Craft

🍷 SUMMMMMER PAAAARTY 🍷 Reminiscing about our recent all-agency weekend away in Porto ❤️ Every year we hit up a different inspiring city, and our Craft passport stamps include Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Edinburgh 🛩 Where shall we go next year?

All of the contradiction and interest that every great brief needs: ✴ educate people on something they have always had ✴ make science simple ✴ fight the fads ✴ get people interested in their insides … that’s right, it’s gut health. The hot topic of 2024, it’s time to search for the hero inside yourself: a healthy microbiome. If you need more proof that it’s one to watch, know that #GutTok has over one billion views on TikTok. 🚀 The exciting thing? Challenging embedded health conventions calls for challenger brands. The gut health movement is kick-starting innovation in categories far and wide, and here are some of our favourite recent launches… ▶ Living Things Soda rejects the boresome tone of trad func bevs and instead plays a quirky, natural role for Gen Z and millennial consumers. The branding, by Studio NARI, brings us vibe above virtue. ▶ ZOE is the OG Queen of gut health, known for blue cookies and notorious waiting list. This month, they've launched their first own-brand product. ZOE Daily30+ was designed by Butterfly Cannon and is positioned perfectly in natural lifestyle goods, backed by cutting-edge science. ▶ Lactose intolerance might not be a captivating subject, but the Milky brand is. From the branding people, this brand takes the story of goddess Hera spraying milk across the sky and turns it into a progressive identity. Galactic graphics, cosmic hues, and holographic finishes bring modernity to a category that really needed it. ▶ Wit, charm, probiotics. GGT studio has a mission to bring feminist, inclusive and LGBTQ+ vision to all of their projects. Mission accomplished, with the probiotic-rich good girl snacks ‘Hot Girl Pickles’ which have taken TikTok by storm this summer. Waiting for a brand agency to offer ‘creativity for the head, the heart and the gut’ soon… you heard it here first. #wellness #lifestyle #challengerbrand #brandidentity #branding #design

“I just don’t have the capacity to find people / focus on what I need to / manage everybody I need to manage.” While meeting fatigue is real, those seven hours of catch-ups are essential in the life of any studio. So how can you make it all just… go away? We’ve heard a lot of different approaches to managing meetings, from every department running them at the same time to streamline whole-company diaries, to no-meeting-Mondays, or indeed all-meeting-Mondays to clear the week ahead. 👥 It’s been suggested that cancelling one-to-ones is the secret to a week full of flow time. While 121s are necessary for morale, connection, and coaching, for executives in particular, they are often seen as ineffective and inefficient. While this makes sense on paper, we advise you cancel with caution. In HubSpot’s 2023 research, they found 66% of workers expressed a lack of strong connection with their co-workers. And that leads to a lack of engagement to your company, to work, and will ultimately affect your retention rate. How are your senior team meant to lead people they don't feel connected to? So, what’s the answer? 💡 Make sure you have a clear structure for 121s. ‘What’s worked this week, what hasn’t’ can go far, a capacity check along with personal chat makes for a well-rounded check-in. With the right questions, and effort made to stay on track, you might find you can turn 30 minutes into 20. 💡 Take a look at the frequency of these meetings - when asked, most people are happy with fortnightly or monthly manager catch ups, so you might be burning time weekly unnecessarily. 💡 Go on - check your diary now. Bonus points if you take a 121 structure to your manager to save you both time! #time #meetings #design #designbusiness #efficiency

Where should creative vision and commercial clarity meet? It’s a hot topic in any studio, as different disciplines need to balance priorities to create a fully rounded business. Our latest newsletter comes from Senior Recruiter Jacob, who partners with NYC’s most ambitious design businesses. He shared his key learnings and insights for those looking to champion creativity in their business, including... 🔄 The shift in responsibilities of a Creative Director: from creative vision to functional sales. 💰 Average marketing budgets have fallen to 7.7% of overall company revenue, down from 9.1% in 2023. 🧠 How business owners can attract more commercial thinkers within a design department. 💸 Speaking of money, Jacob also highlighted some recent projects that highlight the shift of visual codes in the finance sector. Here's Loooop Studio's Fluence brand, and Design Bridge and Partners's work for Precise Mortgages 😍 If you haven't received the latest Craft newsletter but you'd like to, send us a message on here or contact Jacob if you're looking to grow your senior design team in the US. #designrecruitment #designthinking #commercial #creative

Should you offer mental health days? Nike has an annual Well-Being Week where it gives every employee a scheduled, paid week off at the same time, encouraging self care and time to power down. Linkedin does this too, and Duolingo offers two weeks for the same reason. These are extreme examples of where large groups are able to offer paid time off to all, speaking volumes about their ability to support staff and dedication to personal wellbeing. A more accessible version of this is the Mental Health Day, or Duvet Day. These days can reduce stigma around mental health and improve morale (even if they’re not used) and improve retention of staff. 👉 Sounds good, right? These days do divide opinion though; they could trivialise mental health issues and fail to address underlying workplace stressors. Relying on time off is a sticking plaster to greater needs. After all, two-thirds of workers say that the mental benefits of time off disappear within a few days* - so are these days really helping anybody, or should we prioritise a more comprehensive support system at work? —— ➡ Offering Mental Health Days could be a good move for small teams that don’t have dedicated People & HR support in place. Where empathy is needed but a small team is stretched and more impacted by somebody being out of the business, this is a solution that gives time and space. We recommend you organise a 121 a day or two later, to check in and see where you can offer further support. ➡ In larger teams, dedicated People roles should be able to offer richer empathy and time to employees. Until you have a conversation about why a Mental Health Day is needed, you don’t know whether the correct course of action is time, space, reduction in workload, a stronger support network, or a myriad of other things. People managers should have license to approve time off if needed for mental health. —— Once used purely for physical issues, ’sick leave' could be the answer we’ve missed all along. Treating both mental and physical needs with the same language encourages honesty. So a change in your policy may not be needed - so long as you're caring for workload, encouraging an open culture where people are listened to, and supporting staff when they’re back to work. *In a 2018 American Psychological Association survey of more than 1,500 US workers, two-thirds of respondents said that the mental benefits of vacation had disappeared within a few days. #mentalhealthday #mentalhealthsupport #duvetday #peopleandhr #retention

A few snaps from our recent trip to Porto! Celebrating success is a BIG deal to us, and ten years in business with this incredible team needed something momentous. So a weekend away was just the ticket - and we enjoyed incredible dining experiences, impromptu karaoke, impressive (or excessive) dancing, port tasting, exploring, climbing and more port tasting. What a pleasure to get the team together, with only one question remaining… has anybody checked on Emily? #team #teamtrip #companytrip #holiday #growtogether #celebrate #success #business

Why do we partner with Creative Lives in Progress? Creative Lives in Progress is an inclusive creative careers resource, with a mission to transform the way emerging talent accesses and understands the industry. Our sponsorship helps make that mission possible, and we are proud to support people from all backgrounds at every point in their creative career. ➡️ This gives us insight on the challenges and barriers to entry in the design industry ➡️ We learn a lot about hot topics that matter to up and coming talent ➡️ DE&I is a top priority for CLIP so we can access new insights and embed up-to-date best practice ➡️ Our team offer portfolio and career advice - one of our favourite things to do! Here's Anna & Emily at the most recent Design Careers event. #design #designnetwork #designrecruitment #diversity #talent

Don’t go there 💁♂️ The latest Craft newsletter looked at how clever design provides a platform for the usually hidden, the unmentionable, and the NSFW. None of these topics are truly taboo, but we celebrate the few who speak up about those unnecessarily-censored aspects of life, and use creativity to deliver empathy and support. Some of our favourite examples? 🐈 From our friends at Unfound Studio , a new brand for VJJ voices vaginal knowledge for the good of women's health. And when the voice is this witty, we’re listening. >> https://lnkd.in/e3rj__n3 ❣ 89% of people who menstruate have experienced anxiety or stress at work because of their period. Nice and Serious collaborated with Bloody Good Period to create an 'information corner’ so everyone can start feeling more comfortable talking about periods. >> https://lnkd.in/emZjGGUK 🍆 Like all the best ideas, this one started as a gap in the market. BUCK has positioned sexual wellness brand Sense between the “dark and scary” sex brands and more sensual, timid ones. Unapologetically embracing the world of play, they aim to give sexual safety a natural place in the journey of desire. >> https://buck.co/work/sense #design #branding #creativity #designstudio #designrecruitment #newsletter

What does Craft do? It's quite simple really: 💥 We shape creative teams and discover dream jobs 💥 Our clients are world-class design agencies and global creative studios, who we connect with inspiring, team-defining talent. And we're very proud of what we do. You can find out more about our partnerships, jobs and opportunities right here: https://craftagency.co.uk/ #branding #job #designjob #designer #clientservices #brandstrategy

We admit it. We have very good taste in office space. It’s essential that our team have hardworking tech, up-to-date programmes and a space they can call ‘work,’ not home. When Fionn said she wanted a new space to work from, we found one for her. So welcome to our latest Craft space; A'DAM&Co.work in Amsterdam's A’Dam Tower. And with our ‘work from anywhere’ benefit, this spot is open for fellow Crafters from the UK too 👯♂️ #workspace #workfromanywhere #office #newspace 📸 Images from the A’DAM&Co website