Swan Studio’s story begins with a startup that lived or died by its creative—Urban Swan. The venture capital-backed date marketplace became one of Australia’s fastest-growing couples’ experience platforms and attributed its growth to social creative that actually converted.
For co-founders Dean Gruskin and Joshua Israeli, creative was a crucial driver of Urban Swan’s growth. The pair quickly realised that while an effective overall growth strategy was important, the real lever was creative underpinned by psychology, mapped out meticulously and set up for rigorous testing.
“We knew that social media marketing (SMM) was going to play a crucial role in cutting through to our target audience Gen Z’s and younger Millennials so this is something we invested in from the start,” the founders explained to B&T. “We quickly realised our strategy was working and gradually leaned into it more and more”.
Urban Swan’s socials quickly grew to an audience of 70,000 engaged followers with millions of views and consistent viral videos. “SMM was a big thing then, but looking back, it was really in its nascent stages relative to where things are today. For example, TikTok marketing for businesses was a completely new thing!”
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But as Urban Swan scaled, something unexpected happened—the marketplace vendors kept asking Gruskin and Israeli how they were achieving such strong results and were amazed by the traction successful social posts and ads were generating for their businesses. The requests for social creative as a standalone service started to trickle in, but got to a point where the founders thought they should give it a go full-time.
Urban Swan’s founders started with one-off content packages for experience providers, which quickly evolved into ongoing retainer relationships as clients saw the consistent results they could achieve. Gruskin and Israeli quickly realised the same strategy, approach and obsession for great service and results could be offered to all brands looking to grow online, and soon enough the studio was catering to all brands from e-commerce to fintech to lifestyle brands.
“We saw the natural opportunity,” Gruskin and Israeli said. “If this approach could work for our business, it could be done for others”.
What started as a side experiment quickly evolved into something much bigger. Rather than trying to retrofit social onto existing agency models, Swan Studio was built from the ground up to be social-first.
In less than two years, this challenger agency told B&T it has scaled to multi-million-dollar revenue, assembled a team of 20 plus creatives, and partnered with some large Australian direct-to-consumer brands, including Pilot and more recently MenuLog, with Swan Studio announcing the partnership as part of its continued momentum with Australia’s most recognisable brands.
Built for Social’s Reality
Through Urban Swan, the founders realised that to play in social creative you needed to be able to execute high volume, be adaptive and iterative.
“Social is high volume, adaptive and iterative,” commented the co-founders. “Traditional agencies weren’t built for that reality. So we did it our way.”
Gruskin and Israeli bring a unique combination of finance, consulting, and fast-growth startup experience to the agency world. Their backgrounds span Afterpay, Oliver Wyman, and their own venture-backed marketplace Urban Swan.
But perhaps most importantly, they built Swan Studio as former clients themselves. Having worked with dozens of service providers while scaling their own businesses, the pair experienced firsthand what works and what doesn’t in agency relationships.
“As business founders, we know the responsibility that comes with being selected as an agency partner,” they said. “We’ve been on the other side of the table. We know what it feels like when an agency doesn’t deliver, and we know how critical results are to your business.”
This client-first perspective shaped everything about Swan Studio’s approach. As serial entrepreneurs, they built the agency with a founder’s obsession with systems, data, and scalable growth, but also with deep respect for the trust brands place in the agency partners.
The result is an agency model that treats social marketing as both art and science. Every piece of creative is immediately measurable, every creative decision is data-driven, and every client result is transparent in real-time.
“We love being monitored by our results. In social, you see success immediately. Traditional agencies aren’t built for that level of accountability. We apply everything we learned as clients to how we work with our clients.”
Tech-Forward from Day One
Coming from the tech world, the founders have built AI adoption into Swan Studio’s DNA.
The agency develops bespoke AI tools internally and maintains a culture of proactive tech integration, from internal AI-powered workflows to consistent team training, and integration of text-to-video, image and voice technologies in creative production.
“We’ve taken note of AI since the roll out of the original ChatGPT model and have continuously thought of ways to integrate it into the business and in the work we do for clients,” the pair stated. “To not do so would be a huge mistake.”
With momentum firmly established, Swan Studio remains focused on what got them here—continuing to grow while delivering increasingly better work for its clients.
“Our vision is to build the social agency of tomorrow,” concluded Gruskin and Israeli.
“To us, this has dual meanings. It recognises we are always striving to be better but also that we want to write the playbook for the future model that is recognised as best in class for social.”
Israeli and Gruskin still run Urban Swan, however, the pair admitted they’ve been so consumed with the growth of Swan Studio and client work, that the haven’t spent as much time on it as they would have liked. But their attention will be more prominent in the back-end of the year, as it’s a seasonal business that ramps up around gifting times.
