This decision is usually made on salary cost alone, which is why it is usually made badly.
THE REAL COST OF IN-HOUSE
A mid-level designer's salary is the smallest part of it. Add recruitment, software licences, hardware, management time, the cost of the role sitting empty during a notice period, and the cost of the work that does not happen while you hire a replacement.
Then add the ceiling. One designer is one skill set. They will be strong at two of packaging, print, digital, motion, and illustration, and weak at the rest. Every project outside their range gets outsourced anyway, or gets done at a standard you tolerate rather than want.
WHAT IN-HOUSE DOES BETTER
Availability. Someone in the room at four o'clock on a Friday. Institutional immersion. They sit in the meetings, hear the arguments, absorb the politics. Volume on the small stuff. A high frequency of minor, low-complexity requests is genuinely cheaper in-house.
If your creative need is high volume, low variety and constant, hire. That is the honest answer.
WHAT AN EXTERNAL PARTNER DOES BETTER
Range. You are buying a team, not a person. The packaging specialist, the print producer and the digital designer are all available in the same month without three salaries.
Continuity across turnover. In-house designers leave, usually every two to three years, and the brand knowledge leaves with them. A partner relationship that has run a decade does not have that gap.
Perspective. Someone who works across sectors brings solutions your category has not tried. Someone who only works on your brand eventually stops seeing it.
Production reality. Most in-house teams have never stood at a press. The gap between an approved artwork and a correctly printed job is where budgets die.
THE ANSWER MOST COMPANIES LAND ON
A small in-house team for velocity, an external partner for range, depth and custody. The inhouse designer handles the daily flow. The partner handles the identity, the significant campaigns, the production-critical work, and the institutional memory.
That model only works if the partner relationship is long enough to be worth anything. Which is the argument for choosing one carefully and then staying.
Working out which way to go? Send us your last twelve months of creative requirements and we will map which ones genuinely belong in-house.
