Building in public
A week in my life as an agency owner
I’m sure most of you prob know this, but as well as writing here I also run a business.
Lately I’ve been taking part in quite a lot of podcasts/events/guest editing/interviews etc, and in every chat I’ve been asked about my day job and what it’s like being an independent agency owner in such a volatile time for the creative industries.
I realised I’ve never written about any of that here. But my day job is where I find the inspo/intel for everything I write for Pattern Recognition.
All of my thoughts/phrases/provocations (things like meh-ification, or ultra-processed people, or patina as a status signal, astroturfing, status sentience, or cultural omnivores, the obsession economy, crisis tribes, the return of speakeasies?, and over-the-counter culture) came out of a boardroom conversation I’d had sometime in the preceding few days.
What I talk about when I talk about work
My day job is founder of Tomorrowism, a brand strategy consultancy that helps CMOs, CEOs and their investors/advisory boards with the fundamentals of modern brand-building. We work in and around the fashion system (and some related aspiration-driven categories like beauty/skin, home, consumer tech, sometimes travel, food/bev).
It’s an unbundling of brand strategy from the trad full-service creative agency model. To expand what it is + can be for modern businesses. And to give it a bigger canvas, a longer range, and a more upstream position. Putting it where it always should have been.
There are three partners: Paul, Mark, me.
P is the business/ops expert, having spent 20 years running (sometimes selling) independent creative agencies, design agencies, etc.
M is a supremely talented brand designer able to visualise and contextualise the strategic evolution we’re taking a brand on in all sorts of ways, ideally by constructing a whole new brand world/universe.
Both have v high taste levels and are more adept than anyone I’ve worked with in the nuances of the cultures and subcultures around the fashion system.
Aside from the day-to-day work, right now we’re re-platforming + upgrading the design system on our own website, adding a bunch of recent projects that aren’t on there (this is agency life…your site will never be right). So I’m overhearing them discussing some very obscure references this week. There are design books and magazines everywhere. We’re briefing UX designers next week so this is the messy fun bit before actual decisions need making.
Mark also owns the best bookshop in the world with his partner, Alex, who also has a creative practice of her own too. The store is Salted Books. I bet a lot of you guys already know ‘em. I know how much you lot like books.
And I’m the strategy partner. Before Tomorrowism I sat on the leadership teams/boards of a few creative agencies/consultancies/orgs (Wieden+Kennedy, adam&eveDDB, VICE, Portas) in roles where I was responsible for the agency’s strategic output, and people.
So for most of my career I worked on big brand-building projects and interventions for Nike, Google, John Lewis, VW, Honda, The North Face, Vans, etc. In amongst, I was lucky to spend a couple of years in central government working on ‘behaviour change’ at its most mass, generations-long range: building, then tracking effects of, government comms on seemingly-intractable social issues like truancy, teen knife crime and teen pregnancy.
Fast-forwarding to quitting corporate to go independent, I started out just by myself with two founding clients (Urban Outfitters and The Body Shop — famously bold, risk-taking orgs who took a risk on me), and it grew from there over the past 3.5 years or so.
This is what’s been on the slate this past week:
MONDAY
Final stages of a brand repositioning process for a premium contemporary/high-end-high-street fashion brand that’s under new leadership, with a new c-suite and a new advisory board. The change is epic. We’re really excited about this one. The evolution will start coming into public domain in the next couple of months. This week we’re all working on deadlines for different sections of our two final deliverables. We’ve been on this for about nine months so far.
A similar scope of work, but a bit smaller and faster, to what we did with LYST last year. And more recently with Radley London, the 90s handbag brand that’s rebuilt its design atelier with ex-Loewe talent and is about to stage a resurgence.
Podcast recording with Peter Spear for his pod
. Episode came out today. Peter’s a great brain and excellent interviewer.
TUESDAY
Coffee with ex-client who is moving into something cool and new, and wants some help. We sketched out some options together for how we could best support him during his first 100 days in the new place.
1 x advisory call for Nike.
1 x advisory call for Formula One.
Sometimes I’m paid for a 45-60m injection of advice on a specific aspect of brand-building, or to provide an external POV on something important that’s about to happen.
Two new biz meetings: one with a CMO of a big fashion group + one with an investor/incubator group with a portfolio of younger brands. Our client relationships are usually pretty open-ended (as in they often don’t ‘end’ on a set date, instead we tend to stay connected and keep rolling and evolving, sometimes for a couple of years as a strategic reset beds in and expands) but like all agency owners we’re always thinking about the future - what’s next, who’s next, what’s possible. This kind of meeting usually involves prepping a quick creds deck about what we do for who, and how we can help…being ready with a hopefully-useful perspective on their own specific opportunity/challenge.
Interesting email chat about doing some strategy training for a luxury brand’s leadership team. I don’t do this kind of thing very often bc I usually prefer working on the actual business problem. But we are very interested in this company. I have done similar things in the past with PVH Group (Calvin Klein etc) and L’Oreal.
Text from an old boss saying he spotted a typo in my latest Substack essay. LOL. Takes a village.
Completed interview for Colin and Noah at
— The Monday Media Diet. This column is one of my fav weekly Substack reads. It’s Matt Klein this week:
WEDNESDAY
Working with Maddie at Vogue Business on her piece about The White Lotus’ big Season 3 brand partnerships. I love her writing. Some snips from me here:
“This is The White Lotus’s MO, isn’t it? This show always finds ways to make viewers complicit in the very things it criticises. These product collabs could be the most ingenious version of that yet: turning our critique into commerce.”
Lunchtime podcast recording for AJ Lacouette’s new pod, which is yet to publish.
Afternoon was spent working on putting together a series of presentations for a gaming industry brand. I know, not my usual wheelhouse.
But this an interesting project - the kind of pure, big, bold brand strategy that I love. Feels special bc of the scale of this business, and its ambition. A historically very product-led business that wants to be an iconic, generation-defining (and brand-led) org, needing advice with every aspect of that transition. This is a solo consulting gig I’ve been doing over past few months (as in, not with my two partner boys - we don’t do everything together). The client’s leadership team is spread out all over the world - they’re who I went to NYC to meet with pre-Xmas - but are all decamping to UK next week for a series of decision-making sessions.
So this week is content-dev week. I’m partnering with an audience mapping expert for part of these sessions, an econometrician for another. So lots of shared docs and decks and comments and alerts.
Pick up my girls from school and it’s not dark! Spring is coming.
THURSDAY
Roundtable meeting as part of a new-ish project with a v v old British bastion of the high street whose leadership team is desp to reduce heavy reliance on performance marketing and move toward a more well-balanced, longer-term view of brand building. Today I’m running the final in a series of four focussed sessions with their board, investors, and brand team re building the case, the strategic direction, the plan, for this reset. Lots of marketing science here, but I make it fun in places I promise. After this we’ll get into some cultural positioning.
Quick lunch with a different client, talked about an additional project we could do together.
Using my train ride home to write talking points for a guest lecture I’m giving at NYC’s Fashion Institute of Technology next week. Want to make it provocative but simple, with time for chat. The questions are always the best bit when you’re talking with university students.
FRIDAY
Two quick calls with specialist independent studios we’re talking to about collaborating on a new project with us. They both said yes, and they’re both ok for the dates/duration we need. Joy. I kind of had the fear about this particular project. But now I’m excited.
Finally getting to speed-read System Mag issue 23 which has been staring at me all week. And plan some Substack writing for next week (I have a drafts folder with 11 possible titles/subjects, gawd).
We are house hunting right now so we went to a viewing in the afternoon. Picked up children from their after school club. Home to watch old Race Across The World episodes together (it’s a new obsession).
That was my week. Hope you had an interesting one too.
Beth