In an industry that often worships at the altar of optimization, Raw Materials is making a compelling case for something far more radical: originality.
At just 16 months old, the Austin-based studio was named the 2024 D&AD Design Agency of the Year, a staggering achievement for any firm, let alone a fledgling one. But its co-founder and CEO, John Roescher, isn’t interested in simply being prolific. He and his team are interested in being different — on purpose and by design.
We’re at the end of a long era of extraction and people can feel it—even if they don’t yet have the language for it.
John Roescher
Left: John Roescher, Right: Raw Materials C-Suite
For Roescher, creativity isn’t an afterthought or a decorative layer; it’s the essential force that drives great ideas into existence. It’s also, in his view, the single greatest opportunity in a world drowning in sameness. “We’re at the end of a long era of extraction,” he says, “and people can feel it—even if they don’t yet have the language for it.” His mission, and Raw Materials’ reason for being, is to help usher in what he calls a global “Creative Renaissance”: a bold return to ideas that are new, human, and generative.
Raw Materials isn’t following the usual playbook. Instead, the agency is helping frontier industries—like defense, deep tech, and industrial innovation—build brands rooted in clarity and trust, not just aesthetics. For clients like Anduril and Saronic, design isn’t a finishing touch; it’s foundational.
At a time when most brands blur together in the name of scale, Raw Materials is putting meaning back at the center—proving that real creativity doesn’t just support business, it shapes what comes next. Compelled by this approach, I reached out to Roescher to find out what he means by “designing for the frontier” within this “Creative Renaissance”. His responses are below (lightly edited for length and clarity).
You’ve been focusing on “designing for the frontier,” helping companies in industries like defense, deep tech, and advanced manufacturing. What does that phrase mean to you, and why is design suddenly so critical to this new wave of American industry?
I’ve spent my career focused on how to make great things exist. My passion lies in understanding what makes something great and, more importantly, what it takes to make that happen. The most exciting opportunities for me are to apply this passion and skillset to making things that truly have never been done before and that stand to make the biggest impact on humans and the world.
I feel like now, in a way we haven’t seen since the beginning of the internet as we know it (early 2000s) and really since the American Industrial Revolution, companies are forming to build great new things. To solve big problems in new ways. Not to optimize existing ideas in existing sectors but to truly build. And they’re building into spaces that either haven’t been attempted yet or that have been neglected for decades.
To me, this kind of frontier work is where design and creativity can make the biggest impact. There’s an opportunity to bring humanity, intentionality, care, and a level of responsibility to the future world being built right now. My core philosophy is that true human creativity is the best — or perhaps only — way for this to happen. The design of these businesses and how they interface with the world is the method.
As we go out and expand humanity into new frontiers, it should be done by design, not by accident.
Raw Materials has partnered with companies that are reshaping how the US approaches national security and industrial innovation. What role does design play in making these complex, often invisible technologies usable, trusted, and even understood by the broader public?
Companies like Anduril and Saronic are being created to solve big, big problems that exist across national security, advanced technologies, and systems of private-public commerce. From a brand and communications standpoint, there’s a huge responsibility for design to effectively create the company interfaces to speak to a wide and complex audience group.
Most enterprise software, for example, has to be concerned with end users, buyers, and C-suite. This stratum exists for defense tech and new industrial companies as well, but added in is the general public. First, these companies operate in our airspace, our cities, our borders. They affect how people feel about safety, privacy, and even patriotism. Second, when the government becomes a stakeholder, not just in the purchase and use, but in regulation and general adoption, then every citizen is a stakeholder and has a say in what gets used and how.
For example, when working with Anduril, we considered audiences that spanned from generals to operators on the battlefield. And high-tech university graduates destined for Silicon Valley jobs to general public constituents of politicians across the country. Each of these groups matters immensely to the company and needs to feel and be included in its journey to changing how we deter and defend against security threats. We knew that in order to compete against the status quo and win the hearts and minds of these audiences, we needed to design the company’s public presence as transparently and “real” as possible. Especially in those early days, the brand strictly used real, live-action media of its products instead of renderings and CGI.
Design helps the world understand why a technology exists, what it does, how it’s used, and why it matters.
Design helps the world understand why a technology exists, what it does, how it’s used, and why it matters.
You’ve spoken about how the world has become obsessed with optimization and scale, often at the expense of creativity. What do you see as the biggest risks of this mindset for brands, and how do you actively push against it in your work?
My general philosophy about company building is that the most creative moment in the life of a business is when the founder has an idea and takes the first leap. There was a moment when they thought, this thing doesn’t exist, it should exist, and I should be the one to make it exist. From then on, everything is an exercise in getting that idea to exist, to connect with the world and provide value, and to scale. Each of these steps generally puts that original creative idea at risk.
Without the deliberate application of creativity through the journey of building a company, there is a risk (or I think certainty) that the thing that made this core idea great gets diminished and lost. Like a copy of a copy of a copy. Or a game of telephone.
One way companies become victims of their own success is when they remain fixated on a solution or a product in a way that is only extractive in nature. This is generally the “optimize and scale” mindset. “How can I get a little bit more out of this thing?” Instead of, “What are new ways to solve new problems with this invention and this market equity I have?” Optimization is a good thing, and companies should scale great ideas. The risk is over-indexing on this and relying on it as a strategy.
What happens eventually is that everything begins to look and work the same, and then companies are left competing for margins. Then they end up forced to sacrifice themselves or even the safety of their users in order to eke out small wins.
The answer is simple. Difference. If a company can be dedicated to creating something that is truly better than what exists today, not just the same idea made marginally better, but truly better to the point it is fundamentally different than anything else before it, then they have the greatest opportunity of success and fortune.
This is what Raw Materials does. Our main focus is helping companies create and monetize value by being different by design.
You chose to shut down Handsome instead of selling it, a rare and bold move in an industry where acquisitions are often seen as the pinnacle of success. What internal conversations or external pressures did you wrestle with during that decision, and how do you define ‘success’ now?
The people that founded Raw Materials out of Handsome, Pablo Marques, Jennifer Allen, and myself, are simply and truly dedicated to our mission. Not dedicated to our mission as a means to an end–financial windfall. But truly dedicated. Attempting to sell Handsome, participate in an earn-out, and then create Raw Materials from scratch some years later would have been counterproductive. The pinnacle of success we’re fighting for is a legacy of seeing more great things exist in the world.
The pinnacle of success we’re fighting for is a legacy of seeing more great things exist in the world.
You’ve been advocating for a global “Creative Renaissance,” likening it to historical movements that followed periods of mechanization, leading to a true return of new ideas. Can you elaborate on what this renaissance looks like in practice? What signals or cultural shifts are you seeing, and what role should agencies, brands, and designers play in ushering it forward?
The Creative Renaissance isn’t just a prediction. It’s already underway — you just have to look closely. We’re at the end of a long era of optimization: years of extracting more value from the same ideas, squeezing the last drops of juice out of creative fruit that’s been picked over a hundred times. The result is tired brand strategies, the same product experiences, a practically globally standardized design system for how a product should look and work — and people are finally feeling it. They’re sick and tired of sameness, even if they don’t quite have the language for it yet.
At the same time, the most forward-thinking companies — especially in advanced computing, hard tech, defense, and industrial sectors — are being built by visionaries with bold ideas. They’re not optimizing. They’re inventing. And they know that creativity and design isn’t just a layer you add at the end — it’s an essential part of building something new.
This moment is a chance to reshape how we think about value. Not just efficiency or conversion or scale. But meaning. Quality. Contribution.
What we’re seeing now is a tipping point, not unlike what’s happened throughout history after long stretches of mechanization or industrial scale. It’s cyclical. The pendulum always swings back toward imagination, quality, and emotional resonance. I compare it sometimes to the American diet — we’ve gotten so good at making things fast and cheap and palatable that we’ve forgotten what real food tastes like. Eventually, people start to notice they don’t feel good anymore. They want better. The same thing is happening in the design of the things we consume and interact with every day from a product and brand sense. People want things that are healthy again. Human again. That’s what this Creative Renaissance is about.
This moment is a chance to reshape how we think about value. Not just efficiency or conversion or scale. But meaning. Quality. Contribution. That’s what the Creative Renaissance is ushering in — and the ones who lead it will define what comes next.
Raw Materials has amassed a remarkable collection of awards. How do you ensure that success doesn’t lead to complacency, and what strategies do you use to keep your team focused on originality rather than validation?
Our goal is simple: See more great things exist in the world. Our measure of that is, first, do they exist? Did they successfully launch, and are they out there impacting people, businesses, and the world? And second, are they great? Are they living up to the ambitions of the invention and pushing the state of the art forward? Are things better because they exist? The entire team is dedicated to this by design.
Awards are a convenient and gratifying proxy indicator of having done this. Industry award judges have a responsibility and generally succeed at finding things that are special, advance the level of creativity and craft in their domain, and are successful in achieving their stated goals because of it. This alignment with the purpose of our work means we’re flattered and motivated at the recognition by these awards bodies in a way that drives our core focus rather than distracts from it.
Traditional agency models have been in flux for years, with some saying the future lies in in-house teams, automation, or even AI-driven design. Given your perspective on creativity as a business advantage, what do you believe the agency of the future looks like?
There are companies that aim to optimize creativity, find and exploit shortcuts, and outsource their hopes of being fundamentally different and better to machines. And there are companies that know that the fact that their competitors are thinking this way gives them the greatest opportunity. We exist to help the latter.
I do think many agencies of the future, and even today, are system and process implementers. And many, although maybe fewer, are teams of talented, creative, caring people working in environments that foster truly novel and maximally effective ideas and lead the state of the art in how to build and launch those ideas. If the latter becomes rarer, then they’ll be even more important and, therefore, valuable.
This is a bet I’m willing to take. So far, we’ve been lucky to find companies that want to be mature about design and embrace creativity as a fundamental part of their success and the products they ask us to work on.
Imagery provided by Raw Materials.
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