Staying Relevant in a Shifting Industry with Matt Remphrey

Most agency owners are terrified to specialise. Matt Remphrey did it anyway — and it opened doors he couldn’t reach as a generalist.

There’s a conversation that comes up constantly with business owners, especially in creative and professional services: “If I niche down, won’t I lose work?”

Matt Remphrey, founder of Parallax Design, asked himself the same question. After 20+ years running a generalist branding studio in South Australia, he made the call to go all-in on the drinks industry — wine, spirits, breweries.

The result? Better clients, bigger projects, and a competitive moat that generalists simply can’t cross.

Here’s what that journey looked like, and what it means for your business.

The Generalist Trap

When Parallax started, they worked for anyone. Real estate. Legal. Accounting. Whoever walked through the door.

It works — until it doesn’t.

The problem with being broad is that your competition is everyone. Every other agency in your city, every freelancer online, every offshore option. You’re not competing on expertise. You’re competing on price.

Matt put it plainly: “When we were broad, we were competing with 30 other studios. When we narrowed, we might be up against two or three.”

That’s not a minor shift. That’s a complete change in how you win business.

What Niching Actually Does to Your Business

When Parallax committed to drinks, something counterintuitive happened: their service offering got broader.

They went from packaging and identity design to:

  • Brand strategy and naming
  • Trade activation materials
  • E-commerce websites
  • Subscription and loyalty club management
  • Paid ads and SEO for their clients

By knowing one sector deeply, they could see every problem their clients faced — not just the obvious ones. And they could build solutions for all of them.

This is the pattern I see with every business that successfully niches: you stop selling a service and start solving an industry’s problems. Clients pay more for that. A lot more.

The Fear That Holds Everyone Back

So why don’t more businesses specialise?

Matt’s take: “You think it’s going to close a lot of doors. But actually, what it does is open a lot of doors.”

There are two fears at play:

Fear of missing out. Creatives especially want variety. The thought of saying “I only do drinks brands now” feels like voluntarily locking yourself in a room.

Fear of lost revenue. If you turn away a real estate client today, that’s money gone. It’s hard to see that the clients you’re turning away are preventing better clients from finding you.

Both fears are real. Both are also wrong in the long run.

Matt’s point about other professions is worth sitting with: lawyers specialise. Doctors specialise. Accountants specialise. Nobody questions whether a commercial lawyer is “missing out” by not taking family law cases. Why do we hold service businesses to a different standard?

The Credibility Shift

Here’s the practical upside that most people miss: when you specialise, enterprise clients start taking your calls.

A generalist studio has almost no chance of landing a project with a large winery group. They’re going to go to a big agency with a famous name, or a known specialist.

But when you’re the specialist? You’re in the conversation. Size stops mattering. What matters is whether you understand their world.

Parallax now works with corporate wine groups that would never have looked at them as a generalist studio. Not because they got bigger — because they got deeper.

Riding Out the Down Cycles

Specialising doesn’t mean ignoring risk. Matt was direct about the current state of the Australian wine industry: oversupply, post-tariff hangover with China, declining glob

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