Working with young brands and start-ups

We love working with startups and new and emerging brands.

I have a real respect for anyone starting their own business, and one of the great things about being in a creative industry and working alongside other creatives is that you hear many stories and experiences.

Recently, we've worked with a jewellery brand boasting a Moroccan twist, a practical handbag designer with an interesting business model, and a rapidly growing tea brand, to name but a few.

Each of these represents a challenge of its own, but unique to all of them is being aware of what is a very young (if completely raw) audience base - some of which will be seeing a representation of a brand for the first time. There's a bit of pressure there! But it also lets you be a bit braver, in a space where there is so much digital noise, you'll need to create something that stands out.

A good example of this is for the jewellery brand. Have you ever used etsy before? If not, it's a digital marketplace, typically holding the crafts from hundreds of thousands of designers - scrolling down the 'jewellery' section alone highlights just the challenge I'm talking about - image after image for miles, so how do you make yours stand out? There is no easy answer (sorry) but we started by considering what would catch the eye, and what would look intriguing enough to click and see more.

The tea brand is also an interesting one. Our images were primarily being used to illustrate the new website. The company had grown from nothing very quickly, and no longer could they survive with a simple holding page when they not only needed to sell to existing customers but they needed to dramatically grow their offering. Creating images for a website can be relatively straight forward if the design is already in place, and that was the case here. Where we were able to have a little more fun was in the food styling that supported the tea products. Going that extra mile, we were also able to create a stack of accompanying images for a new social media campaign at the same time.

As a new brand, you can never have too much good quality imagery, with the range of social channels hungry for material mad desperate for your attention.

As an image creator, we like to think we're a good fit for a new brand: we don't break the budget, you typically get more than you pay for, and you still get great results.