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Making brands impossible to ignore with White Bear | #CompanySpotlight

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For this week’s company spotlight, we’re talking to Kelly Mackenzie, Founder and CD of White Bear. She founded White Bear seven years ago after working on global Cornetto rebrand at Carter Wong. White Bear was founded based on her passion to use her big brand experience and entrepreneurial background to work with disruptive challenger brands.

Kelly is passionate about gender equality and believes that we are in the ‘female century’ where women are no longer just the family starters. She is addressing why this is as well as ensuring her agency is leading by example, with the agency made up of 70% female talent.

We spoke to Kelly about her company’s smile in the mind thinking and all the game-changing work they currently have in the pipeline.

How was your company born and where are you based?

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My company was born from a few realisations. One, you don’t have to have a big team to do global, impactful work. The last piece of work I worked on as an ‘employee’ was a global rebrand carried out by a team of four.

Secondly - sitting on a hot, stuffy tube made me realise there has to be something better than the monotony of going in every day. I started thinking, why can’t I do what I love from home, or anywhere? And finally, realising that building an agency was a dream of mine, and I wanted to chase my own dreams rather than work for someone else’s.

We are based in London and Dublin with clients both local and global.

What was the biggest challenge to the growth of your company?

The biggest challenge we consistently encounter has been having me as a bottleneck. I am a creative at heart and want to be involved in every piece of work we do, to ensure all our clients get that White Bear ‘smile in the mind’ thinking.

This is great because I’m doing what I love but we therefore need to limit the amount of work we take on and also it limits the time I have to do other activities that may help the business grow such as networking, events, and so on.

We’ve taken steps to mitigate against this with some key senior hires and this has really helped us scale up in the past couple of years.

Another challenge we had was landing on a compelling positioning and value proposition. For the first few years we were nice people doing nice work but didn’t really have a point of difference until we realised some key commonalities between a lot of our clients. Nearly all the brands we were working with were high growth start-ups seeking investment or growth, and we got really good at creating brands that enabled this.

So, we landed on a proposition of ‘Branding Future Unicorns’ which really helped us differentiate ourselves and work with lots of brilliant start-ups. Since then, we’ve evolved as we work with larger and more established brands alongside the challengers, but landing a compelling USP a few years ago was key to our earlier growth.

Which was the first huge success that you can remember?

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Merifor, a baby mattress company that we named and rebranded.  We initially lost the pitch to a much bigger agency as as we weren’t big enough, but when their first choice didn’t work out they came back and took a punt on us.

They ultimately went on to get a lot of investment and sell to Mothercare and we worked with them for a few years building that brand.  My son even still has one of their lovely mattresses!

What’s the biggest opportunity for you and your company in the next year?

We’ve a lot of game changing work about to launch, with some really innovative and exciting challenger brands at the forefront of their categories. I’m excited to see how that helps us continue to attract more great clients.

We’ve also built a real A team of people and players (trusted partners) and I think this presents us with a great opportunity to take to market.

Can you explain your team’s creative process? What makes it unique?

We like to think that our creative solutions are unique but that our process is well defined. Having it well defined helps us deliver unique, client specific solutions.

Our name comes from a study on thought suppression by Daniel Wegner whereby the test subjects couldn’t suppress the thought of a White Bear once they’re asked not to think of it. We like to say we’re creating White Bears for our clients – brands that are impossible to ignore.

Some things we do that help include:

  1. Peer and agency wide reviews with both the project and non project team (creatives and non creatives) – this provides fresh and ‘not in the weeds’ perspective.
  2. Always coming with fresh ideas – if we’ve seen it before or something similar, we rip it up
  3.  Listening – our clients tell us we’re great listeners.

How does your team remain inspired and motivated?

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It can be an ongoing challenge with busy lives, busy agency, and a hybrid working solution. We keep in touch every day with morning wips, creative crits on all projects, and regular team touch bases where we talk about the agency results and everyone’s contribution.

We also value work life balance and are a very working parent centric business. So I think having the ability to do great work in an environment that supports our own family lives helps motivate us all.

How has COVID-19 affected your company?

Covid was of course challenging but it sharpened us as a business. We focused on the basics but also it really helped us look outward a bit more and try to help our clients through difficult times. That also extended to the wider community where we set up our own community of brand and marketing professionals to share experiences and learnings. That grew to 400 or so people.

I’d also say it made us more entrepreneurial as an agency. We could no longer sit and wait for things to happen – and the whole team really dug in and got proactive. This has continued through to today.

Finally, it cemented our belief in flexible working. We’d been early adopters and so the transition for us was seamless, but it really helped when the world moved to that way of working and we didn’t have to travel incessantly.

Which agencies do you gain inspiration from? Do you have any heroes in the industry?

JKR. They always smash it and always really get to the true piece of equity in the brand. I’m really inspired by their brand’s confidence, clarity and simplicity.

In terms of beautiful design, I love Made Thoughts work. I find they approach every project with such a delicate, refined, crafty approach.

I also like Design Studio. I think they’re great at showing brands in motion, and showing the dynamism and power of the brand

What is one tip that you would give to other agencies looking to grow?

Never stop hustling.

How do you go about finding new clients/business? (Pitching, work with retainers, etc.)

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Focus on the work. Design it well and they will come.

What’s your one big hope for the future of the industry?

More diversity. I want more female leadership in the industry.

Do you have any websites, books or resources that you would recommend?

Rocketfuel – Gino Wickman

Ride of a Lifetime – Bob Iger

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