Starting off our theme for the year on telling the truth, we put together a panel of four designers to tell us about their experiences in 2010 and their outlook for 2011.
Our panel of speakers included: Simon Rucker, Head of Strategy, Seymourpowell, Amalia Brightley-Hodges of the newly established Brightley-Hodges Associates, Heidi Lightfoot, creative director of Together Design and Jamie Ellul of Magpie Studio.
Simon Sholl, chairing the event, started off the discussion by saying he thinks that designers quite appropriately see themselves as a sort of jester of the court. Simon spoke about designers being “people who are in a position to tell the truth about a client’s problems or their objectives. If we don’t then we are failing in our job as outside advisors to our clients.”
Our four panellists each spoke for five minutes on how they fared in 2010 and how 2011 is starting to shape up.
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Simon Rucker of Seymourpowell, recently voted UK’s number one design company, told us that during 2010 some parts of the business were wildly successful, but the more traditional product design focus, the real bread and butter of Seymourpowell, hasn’t been so successful. He explained the reason for that was globalisation. The things they used to do very well at when the company first set up in 1984 are now done by people in India, China, South Korea and Taiwan and for a tenth of the price. “It is very difficult to go into an international client base and Seymourpowell has always been internationally focused,” Simon said, “partly because there were never that many good jobs solely in the UK. It has become clear that we were a hitched-on wagon to a train of diminishing returns.” One of the reasons Seymourpowell set up Foresight Ten years ago, the consultancy's research division and forecasting arm, was to try and stop that happening. “So if anything, this is a story about trying to understand business objectives and then understanding how we as a company can really help our clients.”
Now Seymourpowell has fewer but bigger clients. Simon explained that one of the benefits of that is that you can begin to set terms in your contract where you can ask the client to guarantee a certain amount of money and a certain level of commitment. “If they value you, they will respect that,” Simon explained, “it is part and parcel of developing a relationship.”
When asked about the future, Simon said, “What do I think about the prospects for the creative business going forward? I think it is true to say that effective creativity has always been in demand and always will be in demand. Really engaging with what your clients are actually talking about and not what you want to do is difficult, but it is the key to remaining competitive and successful.” Simon mentioned that looking forward, change is the motive force to the windmill and that the key is always looking to do new things and also being driven by clients who are responding to change.
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Amalia Brightley-Hodges told the audience that 2010 was a horrendous year for Still Waters Run Deep, their accountant shafted them, they owed 100k to HMRC and Anita Brightley-Hodges had to put the business into voluntary liquidation. Despite that setback, Amalia still sees every problem as an opportunity. Before they went into liquidation, Amalia told us that design was struggling as part of their business and they realised that it wasn’t what their clients were asking them for. When they started again as Brightley-Hodges Associates they decided that what they were giving away for free as part of their design package, which was consultancy, they could really capitalise on and use. They changed their approach. Design is still a factor as an output of any marketing that they do, they still do branding, marketing, and PR, but, in particular, they run another business which is focused on the family business sector and they run a family business magazine. They realised that it was a market where they were really trusted as advisers being a family-owned business themselves. “A lot of people don’t see this as a market in itself, but if you think there are 1 in 3 people employed in the family business and there are 3 million family businesses in the UK, it was quite a good market for us to get into.” Amalia also explained that what differentiates family business in particular from other types of businesses is that they employ their family because they are family and not necessarily because they suit the job role, which can obviously lead to some problems. Amalia summed up by saying, “So yes we had a horrible year last year and it really gave us the opportunity to re-think what we were as an agency. We work much more efficiently now.” They bring business in and they all get paid fees accordingly, which has made them go after work much harder. All in all it’s been good and positive.
Simon Sholl commented that, “Well that’s news that a cold wind can be graceful.”
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Jamie Ellul who set up Magpie Studio in April 2008, just as the recession hit, spoke about the struggle of starting a business and said that he was completely naïve about business when he started, he knew only about design. His intention was to create great design and branding solutions paired with beautiful craft and attention to detail, which he admitted is a difficult balance to get right. “In hindsight,” Jamie said, “it was probably the best time for us to set up as a small agency. We found that with our combined experience we could do the same kind of large agency work for much smaller fees and immediately things got rolling really well.” He said that 2010 was a very good year for them. They worked really hard and overall they had 13 new business meetings, which resulted in 12 new clients. On that list was Apple, BAFTA, Samsung and the House of Commons. Last year was a real turning point for them. They started with three and grew to six when they began to get bigger clients. Jamie said he thinks part of the reason for that was just from being concentrated on doing very crafted work which got picked up by blogs all over the world. One of the creative directors from Apple saw their work and passed their details on to Worldwide Head of Marketing who then phoned them to say he really loved their work. Two weeks later they got the brief through and started working for them.
They have won 12 awards including one D&AD silver nomination. “People say that awards don’t win work,” Jamie said, “but we found that they did when Samsung emailed us from Korea saying that they’d seen our work in D&AD and asked us to pitch for huge Olympic co-branding, which we are still working on.”
As far as their outlook for 2011, Jamie told us that the thing that they took away from 2010 to take into this year is that in terms of new business, the best new business is old business and ploughing the clients that you’ve already got and doing the best quality work and delivering on time just seems to keep reaping the rewards and keeps clients coming back.
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Heidi Lightfoot is the creative director and founder of Together Design and her aim is to bring personality and character to brands. Heidi told the audience that 2010 was steady, but precarious. Together Design has been going for seven years. In the first four years they grew quite rapidly, but business has remained steady over the past 3 years. Most of their work initially was in the arts, not for profit and retail, almost 50% was retail. But during 2010 the arts almost completely dropped off to just 2 per cent. Heidi cited two very key reasons for that: the number one reason was that funding in the arts has gone down and the second reason was that a lot of their work for the arts consisted of one off projects, such as identities or exhibitions. In the last 18 months Heidi said those one off projects have been the most elusive for them. 80 per cent of their current work is repeat business from clients they’ve worked with for a number of years. Prior to that they had quite a good spread of clients, but in 2010 their client list shrunk incredibly. They were still very lucky in that their regular clients gave them the most work and their size of the pie has stayed the same. Heidi admitted that even though they were still getting regular work, it was precarious because if any of those clients left it would put them in a worrying position. Their goal is to put themselves in a better position by encouraging new clients. The most important thing for them at the moment is to take care of the key clients they already have and make sure they are happy.
They don’t spend a lot of time doing free pitches and they are not reducing their costs very much, they think their costs are fair and want to stick to that, so financially they are not tightening their belts just yet.
Liz Wren from the audience asked the question, “How much of your success is due to skills and track record and how much is down to attitude and mindset?”
Simon Rucker answered the question by saying, “It helps having a great track record, there’s a big difference between what clients want and what they need.” He said that if you are able to demonstrate that you understand their problem better than they do by saying, “I know this is what you are asking for, but isn’t this really what you want?” If they recognise that what you are saying is right, then you have brought value right at the beginning of the relationship. Design is a commercial activity, it is not an art, so the key is understanding commercial objectives.
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Overall, the picture of 2010 is not a bleak picture. From the four panellists, one had a disastrous year which had a silver lining; one was very successful; one was steady; and the other was successful in some areas and not in others. Going into 2011 it seems the main focus for everyone is to concentrate on keeping the clients that they’ve got happy, produce good work and hopefully put on more clients.