Why “Beatnik?”

Written by David • October 8, 2026

“I never wanted to be a businessman in the first place. I’m kind of a craftsman that just happened to become successful.”
– Yvon Chouinard

When I started Beatnik in 2016, I wasn’t really setting out to build an agency. If anything, I was trying to get away from that sort of life.

I’d had a pretty rough period with my mental health and wanted some distance from the rat race. The ambition was fairly simple: make a sustainable living doing good creative work, while leaving enough space to surf, run in the Lakes, travel and generally have a bit more control over my time.

Around then I watched 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless. It had a pretty profound effect on me. The film follows Jeff Johnson retracing the 1968 journey made by Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, and Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face, to Patagonia. Travelling south, surfing, climbing and generally choosing adventure over anything resembling a conventional career path.

I was already interested in Patagonia and Chouinard, but that film sent me much further down the rabbit hole. I read Let My People Go Surfing and became fascinated by that whole culture around climbing, surfing, making things, travelling cheaply and organising work around life rather than the other way around.

The word Beatnik seemed to fit.

Not because I was attempting to recreate 1950s counterculture from a laptop on the North East coast, but because I liked what the word suggested. Independence, curiosity, creativity, movement, and a little resistance to doing things in the expected way.

And for a while, the reality wasn’t too far from the idea. I took client calls from an old campervan in Cornwall, worked while travelling around the Lake District and went on a road trip to Norway to see Radiohead. I could disappear for a surf when there were waves or head out running without having to ask anyone’s permission.

It was great.

Phase two was to grow it into something bigger: a remote collective of designers, developers, copywriters and other specialists, brought in depending on what a project needed. At the time, distributed teams and remote working still felt slightly unconventional. The idea was that you didn’t need an office full of permanent staff to do ambitious work. You could assemble good people around the problem instead.

You could probably even describe it as disruptive at some point. I use that word very loosely. The intention was never to become a menace to the creative industry.

Then the pandemic arrived and the whole fucking world started working remotely. Suddenly Zoom calls, distributed teams and working from wherever you happened to be weren’t particularly Beatnik at all. They were just Tuesday.

The business changed plenty of times too. At one point I tried building a conventional agency. Now, Beatnik is an independent product and digital studio.

In a strange way, that’s probably closer to the original idea than Beatnik has been for years. Good work, interesting problems, enough independence to do things properly, and hopefully enough space left for the rest of life too.

I’m fully aware there may still be someone in a particularly traditional procurement department wondering whether they can really trust a business called Beatnik Studio.

Fair enough.

It’s lasted more than a decade, though. So I think we’re keeping it.