02 · The Studio — the crypts
Most of the work of explaining a difficult thing has already been done by the time anyone calls us. What is missing is the last translation.
Organizations bring us knowledge that is true but unfelt: methodologies, evidence, models, expertise. We turn it into public communication that survives contact with both scientists and strangers.
That is a narrower promise than it sounds. We do not do brand. We do not do campaigns. We write, edit and structure the documents by which a technical organization is believed — the investor narrative, the funding case, the executive op-ed, the report nobody finished reading last year.
The house publishes essays under its own name in the Library. The Studio is the same craft, pointed at somebody else's material. The reason the two live in one building is that the discipline of writing for strangers every week is what keeps the commercial work from drifting into the register that makes people stop reading.
02 · Three commissions — named for the transformation
01
For climate-tech, nature-based solutions, and research-driven organizations.
Investor narratives and presentations. Grant and funding cases. Shareholder messaging. Methodology-grade technical editing, to the standard the registries actually apply. Evidence synthesis. Policy language.
Most communicators cannot survive contact with your science. Most scientists cannot survive contact with your investors. The Studio does both.
Project · retainer
02
For founders, executives, and scientists who need a public voice.
Thought leadership programmes. Executive positioning. Op-eds and bylined features. Discreet ghostwriting. Platform messaging.
The expertise already exists. What is missing is a body of published work that makes it legible to people who will never read the paper.
Retainer — this one does not work as a project
03
For organizations and publications with material the public was told it could not handle.
Long-form features. Science communication. Editorial consulting. Narrative architecture for websites and reports.
The material was never too complicated. It was told without a body in it.
Project · advisory intensive
A fixed deliverable with a defined end. The investor narrative, the report, the launch essay.
The Studio as your narrative desk. Monthly, with a standing call and a queue you control.
One day, remote. Your material, our reading of it, and a written route out by the end of the week.
Studio engagements typically begin at USD $X,000. We say it here so nobody spends a call finding out.
02 · Case study 01 — Floating Island International
A nature-based carbon company with defensible science and no way to say it out loud.
Movement 01 — the situation
Floating Island International builds engineered floating wetlands: a nature-based system for nutrient removal and habitat restoration, with two decades of deployments and a peer-reviewed evidence base behind it.
They were being read as a landscaping company.
The science was not in question. What was missing was any document in which the science was arranged as an argument — the technical papers spoke to peers, the sales material spoke to procurement, and there was nothing in between for the two audiences that decide whether a carbon company grows: investors, and the registries that certify the methodology.
Movement 02 — the complexity
Nature-based carbon has an accounting problem before it has a communication problem, and the two are the same problem wearing different clothes.
Permanence, additionality, leakage and measurement uncertainty are not marketing objections to be handled. They are the actual open questions in the field, and any narrative that steps around them is read as evasion by exactly the people it is written for.
So the constraint was unusual: the document had to be more candid about the limits of the method than the market norm, and more confident about the result. Those two things pull against each other in every draft.
Movement 03 — the translation
We started at the methodology, not at the messaging, because a narrative built on top of an unreviewed method has to be rebuilt the first time somebody technical reads it.
The work then ran outward in one continuous act of translation, each artifact inheriting its claims from the one before it:
One claim set. Six artifacts. Nothing said in the op-ed that could not be traced back to a line in the registry submission.
Movement 04 — the shift
The company stopped being asked what it was and started being asked how the accounting worked.
That is the whole shift, and it is worth naming precisely because it is unglamorous: the conversation moved from category confusion to technical due diligence, which is the conversation a carbon company needs to be having.
Outcomes
The house does not publish a number it cannot source, including in its own commercial copy. Figures from this engagement are with the client for approval to name; until they come back, this section lists what was made rather than what it moved. The artifact list above is complete and is the part we can stand behind today.
Cases 02 and 03 are in preparation — ask and we will send them when they are cleared
Edition 002 · The Translation Layer — working document
Four pages on the specific failure that puts good science in front of the wrong sentence.
It covers the three places a technical claim loses people — the abstraction step, the hedge, and the unearned superlative — and what to do at each. It is written for the person who has to explain a methodology to an investor on Tuesday and to a journalist on Wednesday, and it assumes that person already understands their own material.
There are no framework diagrams in it.
02 · Questions — asked plainly
We write and edit the documents that carry a technical organization's argument: investor narratives, funding cases, methodology submissions, op-eds, long-form features, and the structure of the site those things live on.
The difference from an agency is scope. We do not run campaigns, buy media, design logos or manage social accounts. The difference from a freelance writer is that the work starts at the evidence rather than at the brief, and every claim in the finished document can be traced to a source.
Yes. The house is bilingual and the founder writes natively in both languages, from Patagonia.
That means Spanish work is written in Spanish rather than translated into it, which matters most in exactly the places it is hardest to fake: policy language, funding applications to Latin American programmes, and anything that has to be read by a regulator.
Ricky Lanusse writes and edits Studio work, with specialist collaborators brought in by discipline when a project needs them — a glaciologist to check a claim, a carbon-methodology reviewer to read a registry submission.
Collaborators are named to the client and never used as a credential in public. If you are hiring the Studio, the person doing the writing is the person you spoke to.
Studio engagements typically begin at USD $X,000. A project is quoted on the deliverable; a retainer is monthly with a defined queue; an advisory intensive is a fixed day rate.
We put the anchor on the page because the alternative is a call whose only purpose is to discover that the numbers were never going to meet.
Yes to both, and most of the work is under one.
Case studies on this site publish artifact types and outcomes only — never contents. Nothing is published from an engagement without written clearance, which is why the case above lists what was made rather than quoting from it.
We can write something we would not have concluded ourselves. We cannot write something we believe to be unsupported by the evidence, because the only thing the Studio sells is that its documents survive being checked.
In practice this comes up as a methodology conversation rather than an argument. If a claim cannot be sourced, it comes out of the draft, and what remains is usually stronger for it.
An advisory intensive is one day plus a written route out within the week. A single artifact — an op-ed, a funding case — is typically two to three weeks. A full evidence-to-funding engagement of the kind described in the case study above runs three to five months.
The variable is almost never the writing. It is how long it takes to get the evidence into one place.
If you have something true that nobody can feel yet, that is the whole job.