When did you realise you wanted to be a designer?

When I was around 14 I talked to my careers advisor about my interest in graphic design. They told me that it was too competitive, and I should look for something else. She actually suggested I’d be great as a cosmetics advisor(!). I couldn’t quite see myself working in Boots, but sadly I listened to her and dropped my interest in design as a careers option. It was only after doing a degree in biology that I realised that I really needed to find something I loved, and this wasn’t happening in science. I chanced upon an opportunity as an account exec in an advertising/branding studio in London and fell in love with graphic design and how it affects behaviour.

How did you get started? What was the biggest obstacle?

I played around with studying design and did a course at Camberwell and a few Photoshop and Quark (showing my age!) courses but didn’t make the move into becoming a designer. I decided that I really loved working on the business development / marketing side. I started freelancing at a few agencies and loved how much I was learning about so many different types of businesses that my clients were designing for. I didn’t want to give this up.

My biggest obstacle was not knowing that all of this existed until relatively late on. I didn’t know there was a whole design industry out there and didn’t realise that you don’t have to be a designer to have a great career in design. It’s something I’d like to change in schools today.

I set up Red Setter when I realised that there wasn’t anyone giving the design industry a voice and celebrating great brand design beyond the design media. We now work with many of the best brand design agencies in the world helping them shape their reputations.

What’s been your most successful way of getting clients?

By doing great work for our clients. We work with brand design agencies, raising their profiles through PR. Often design agencies will come to us having seen what we’ve done for their competitors, saying ‘we want some of that!’.

We get our clients’ voices into the sort of media that really gets them noticed. Design media absolutely has its value, but for their wider reputation, being on the radar of business decision makers in national and business media is essential. When a client shares that a lead for them has come directly out of an article or speaker platform we’ve found and crafted for them, it’s a huge acknowledgement on the value of PR and comes from our experience of finding the right story, knowing how to write it, and having the right contacts.

How do you get clients to stay with you and use you for more work?

A combination of great results and great relationships. Both feed into each other. The clients that stay with us for the long term are the ones who value their reputation and use the coverage we get for them to enhance their client conversations and share on social media.

Do you ever have issues with clients paying late? How do you manage that?

I think every agency experiences this at some point or another. We obviously have terms in our contract, and trust they will make payment in good time, but we have to remind some. Late payment impacts all sorts of things. We’ve been burnt in the past so are more careful now when we see repeated late or non-payment as we have to protect our team.

What does your typical work day look like?

I tend to be in the office 2-3 times a week, which is time for internal team catch ups, speaking to clients and new agencies. The other days I’m often travelling and meeting up with clients wherever they are based (we have clients globally).

When I’m working on the podcast ‘My Life in Design’ then it’s pretty full on arranging it all, meeting my guests and recording in person ideally. Anything face-to-face really makes a difference, especially after the forced Zoom years.

Any piece of advice/wisdom that you’d like to give to the readers at This Design Life?

The best advice I give myself and that which I’d pass onto others comes from Mo Gawdat’s thinking about the importance of focusing on what you can change, and not worrying about what you can’t. You can waste a lot of time worrying about how to solve climate change for example, but I know that beyond acting responsibility there’s not a lot I can do about it personally. There are many great scientific minds who are concentrating on solving this and my worry isn’t going to help. Focusing on an area where you can make an impact is much more effective.

For me, raising awareness of design and its value is an area I can have impact. Design needs more young people from diverse backgrounds, and that will only happen if kids, careers advisors, teachers and parents realise that it’s a great and important industry that has many different roles within it. It’s one of the reasons I set up the podcast ‘My Life in Design’ to tell the stories of successful people within design and I’m a co-founder of the Creative Industry Alliance (alongside D&AD president Jack Renwick and JKR ECD Sean Thomas). This is a campaign to urge the government to consider the impact of underinvesting in state school art and design subjects, underlining how it negatively affects the economy, diversity and our cultural identity. I hope through these initiatives I can affect how diverse design will be in the future and show the positive impacts of this.