What to bring to the first sitting

You do not need a polished dossier. You need the papers you actually trust and the decision the charts must survive.

The first sitting is an intake, not a performance. Come with the question in a sentence: hold the bottling, staff the booth, delay a purchase, brief an editor. Then put on the table the papers you would defend if a clerk asked where a number came from.

Useful: cellar books, customs extracts, Geostat printouts, association yearbooks, a list of years that matter for a contract. Useless: a slide that already claims the trend, a request to make the line “look more certain,” and a pile of printouts whose units you cannot name.

If the papers are a mess, say so. Archive reconstruction exists for that mess. Tidying the file the night before so that it resembles a series is how unmarked joins get into a sketch.

The atelier is on Level 10. There is a table that takes a yearbook open flat. There is not a reception that will translate your question into a different one while you wait.