Spinach was founded in 2002 and is jointly run by Lucy Morris (pictured) and Gary Cawker who will both remain in their managing director roles.

It will now run with an in-house team of 12, plus freelancers, down from 21 a year ago. While a number of roles have been lost to natural attrition over the past year, four staff were made redundant last week.

Morris said: “Gary and I wanted to be much more hands on with project work. When we were 15+ and beyond we felt we had to be more structured and internally focused. We couldn’t devote as much attention to our project work as we’d ideally have liked, because of the demands of running a larger team.

“After a lot of soul searching, we have decided to get back to doing what we love and play to our strengths. To enable us to become more hands-on as researchers again, we have chosen to streamline our team to the optimum size and shape to support us on servicing our existing valued client base.”