How to Evaluate a Design Studio With No Case Studies

A founder came to us on a recommendation from one of our previous clients. Early in the conversation, he asked to see the work we’d done for that client, to check whether we were any good.

We said no, politely. That work is under NDA.

And then we pointed out something he already had. He’d been recommended to us by the person whose work he wanted to see. That recommendation was the proof. The client had seen everything, lived with the results, and chose to send a peer our way.

You don’t need to look under the hood to know a muscle car has muscle. If it runs great, someone did the job well, and the owner got a good deal.

That’s why Spirixx publishes no case studies. The work founders hire us for only works while nobody has seen it. Which leaves you with a fair question: if you can’t see the portfolio, how do you judge a design studio? This post gives you:

What a case study actually proves, and what it hides
What B2B buyers trust instead, according to 2025 and 2026 research
Seven things to ask any studio, so you can judge it on evidence you can check yourself

What a case study proves, and what it hides

A case study is written by the vendor, about the vendor, after the vendor picked which project to show.

It proves someone did good work once. It doesn’t tell you:

How many projects didn’t make the page
What the baseline was before the “3x” in the headline
Whether the people who did that work will do yours
Whether the client agrees with the story

I looked for research that measures how much buyers trust case studies specifically. I couldn’t find any, so I won’t quote a number. But the research that does exist points in one direction.

What buyers actually trust

In a SurveyMonkey and Reddit study of 1,202 US business decision-makers (March 2026), 73% trusted peer recommendations. Vendor websites came in at 55%. AI chatbots at 39%.

TrustRadius’s 2026 buying study of about 2,500 buyers and vendors found demos, free trials and prior experience among the most influential sources. 83% of buyers shortlisted three options or fewer.

The Edelman and LinkedIn B2B study (February 2024, 3,484 executives) found that 73% of decision-makers see a firm’s thought leadership as a more trustworthy basis for judging its capabilities than its marketing materials.

Gartner’s June 2025 survey found that 69% of B2B buyers noticed differences between what a supplier’s website said and what its sellers said.

Put it together. Buyers trust peers, their own hands-on experience, and evidence of how a firm thinks. They distrust material the vendor wrote to sell. A case study is material the vendor wrote to sell.

The founder in the story above was holding the most trusted kind of proof there is, a peer recommendation, and asking for the least trusted kind instead.

AI made portfolios cheaper to fake

A polished case study used to take weeks of a designer’s time. In 2026, prototyping tools generate convincing screens from a prompt, and a language model can write the story around them.

A Dribbble shot proves someone can draw. So can a model, now.

That pushes proof towards things that can’t be generated: a live read of your own product, a written output you keep, and terms someone signs.

Seven things to ask any studio

Use this list with us or with anyone else. It works either way.

A live read of your product on the first call. Bring the product. If the people on the call can’t tell you something useful about it in thirty minutes, the case studies don’t matter.
The names of the people who’ll do the work. Then check that they’re the people on the call.
A paid, scoped first step with a written output you keep. It’s the services version of a free trial, and trials are among the sources buyers rate most influential.
The price, the output and the exit, in writing, before anything starts. A studio that can’t state its price before the call is pricing you, not the work.
How they handle your data, including AI tools. Which tools, which plan, training on or off.
What the website says, compared with what the call says. If they differ, trust the call less.
Your own network. Peer recommendations are the most trusted source in the data above. Ask founders you know who they hired and how it went. If a studio came recommended, you already have your answer to the question a case study was supposed to answer.

The trap: “work under NDA, available on request”

Plenty of studios show confidential work privately. Blurred screens. A password-protected page. “We can walk you through it on a call.”

Think about what that means for you. A studio that walks you through another client’s unreleased screens to win your project will walk the next prospect through yours.

We don’t show client work, in public or in private. Some clients let us describe the logic of a problem we solved. None would want us to show the decisions, because those decisions are their know-how. When you become a client, you’ll be glad we hold that line.

How we answer the seven

On the call. It’s 30 minutes with a principal, not a salesperson. Bring the product and we’ll tell you what we see in it, live, before you’ve paid anything.

Who does the work. The principals on your first call lead the work and review everything before it reaches you. No handoff to juniors. When a project needs a specialist, such as an iOS developer, they’re senior and vetted, and they work under our direction. I’ve spent 20 years designing for startups and scale-ups. My co-founder, Valeria Shumska, has 10+ years in systems and product design. We take three projects at a time.

The first step. Every engagement opens with a two-week Clarity Sprint: €5,500 to €6,500, or €8,500 with a technical architecture review. You get a written report mapped against your own analytics, and you keep it whether or not you continue. Want to see the format first? Here’s a worked example on an invented product.

The terms. Fixed scope, one defined output every two weeks, a recorded walkthrough instead of a status call. Every Clarity Sprint carries a written guarantee. Booked on its own, it works like this: if the report doesn’t surface at least ten times its fee in annual impact, we refund the fee. The full terms are in the agreement.

Your data. Our mutual NDA is available on request before the discovery call. If you don’t ask then, it’s signed with the contract, before any work starts or any data changes hands. We wrote down what a good one covers in our post on mutual NDAs for design work.

The honest no. Some of these calls end with us saying you don’t need us yet. That’s a real outcome, and thirty minutes is a cheap way to find out.

Your next step

Before your next call with any studio, do two things. Ask a founder you trust who they’d hire, and why. Then bring your product to the call and judge the studio by what it can see in it.

Don’t judge a studio by the work it’s allowed to show you. Judge it by what it can see in yours.

Book a free 30-min call, or read how our NDA-first studio works.

Sources

Why We Publish No Case Studies, and What to Ask For Instead