After celebrating its 15th anniversary in December, Fenti capped off the milestone by being named Best Creative Business at the unLTD Business Awards. We headed to the digital marketing agency’s Killamarsh base to meet owners Mark and Elaine Shipley and find out what’s behind its success, how the industry has changed and why looking after your people remains integral to their approach.
There’s something immediately telling about Fenti’s office when we arrive at Westthorpe Business Innovation Centre in Killamarsh: every desk is occupied.
At a time when plenty of businesses are still debating the merits of hybrid working, their 14-strong team are all office-based. More importantly, judging by the animated chatter and laughter around its spacious top-floor workspace, they seem pretty happy about it too.
It makes sense once we sit down with husband-and-wife owners Mark and Elaine Shipley and hear one of the key principles behind the company.
“For us, employees are the most important thing in the business,” Mark tells me. “Because if they’re happy, they’re going to work hard and well for our clients. We want employee satisfaction above everything else.”
It might sound counterintuitive coming from someone who spent much of his career in sales, but there is solid business logic behind it. Fenti effectively acts as an outsourced marketing department for some sizeable businesses, meaning its clients are trusting the team with big brands, budgets and reputations. Keeping the people responsible for that work happy is not treated as a nice extra; it’s vital.
“We’ve previously had customers that have caused unnecessary stress to staff and we’ve not renewed the contract,” Elaine says. “We are honest businesspeople and want to do things properly. It’s about values.”
A people-first philosophy has helped take Fenti a long way from its beginnings in December 2010, when Mark’s first challenge was simply getting through the front door.
Anyone who remembers the winter of 2010 will recall the historic snowfall that brought much of the country to a halt. 16 years down the line, you’d be forgiven if the details are a little hazy, but Mark certainly hasn’t forgotten. He had planned to get going with his new business on the Monday, only for the weather to intervene.
“I literally had to delay my first day at the office until the Thursday or Friday,” he laughs. “So certainly not the best of starts, but thankfully it wasn’t an omen!”
Prior to this, Mark had spent 13-and-a-half years working for a global paper merchant before moving to one of his print industry clients, where he progressed to director level. After leaving three years later, he had a decision to make: return to the paper industry, find another job in print or have a go himself.
He chose the latter, drawing on his contacts to find clients and outsource print and mailing work, while Elaine continued working independently as a graphic designer. At first the two businesses remained separate, with Mark managing the commercial and print side and Elaine producing artwork through her own company.
The marketing landscape they were working in was very different from today, with a key emphasis on print. “A lot of it was: print 10,000 brochures, send them out and hope somebody makes a call back to place an order,” Mark explains. “That was obviously a huge difference compared with where we are now and how quickly you can get information out to people through email and social media.”
Fenti’s move towards digital began surprisingly early in its story. Around six months after launch, Elaine introduced Mark to a web developer who was building websites and exploring email marketing. They saw an opportunity to offer existing clients another way of reaching customers without the expense of printing and distributing thousands of brochures.
“Quite quickly that took off,” Mark says. “We started doing more email marketing, sending people back to websites and then clients wanted to upgrade those sites because they were getting clicks through to them. From there, we started building websites, hosting them and increasing our offer.”
It set the direction for much of what followed. As the ways businesses reached their customers changed, Fenti gradually added the expertise to match, moving from web development into SEO and paid advertising, followed by social media and content creation. Today, its in-house capabilities cover SEO, PPC, content writing, graphic design, web development, photography, video and social media, with custom software and app development among the newer areas of the business.
For a company that began by outsourcing much of its work, bringing those disciplines under one roof was, in Mark’s words, “always the dream”. The advantage is less about being able to describe Fenti as a ‘one-stop shop’ and more about the in-person collaboration between departments it brings. A project can move seamlessly from design into web development and SEO, with specialists working together rather than each part of the job being treated separately.
In the same vein, there are deliberately few barriers between clients and the people carrying out the work. Elaine oversees projects from a strategic perspective, but clients are encouraged to interact directly with the designers, developers, writers and other creatives working on their account.
“We have a lot of retainer-based clients, around 30, so we are essentially their complete marketing team,” Elaine explains. “We do everything for them, so that connection and availability is important.”
They work with businesses at varying stages of development, whether evolving an established identity or creating a new brand from the ground up. OEC Sheffield, part of the A&S Leisure group, is one example, with Fenti involved from the outset in developing its logo and brand before going on to deliver its website, social media, email marketing and content. Elaine’s proud to add that many client relationships stretch back to the agency’s earliest years.
While the breadth of work has changed considerably since 2010, so have the tools available to the people delivering it. Inevitably, that brings our conversation to AI and the questions it is raising across an industry built around creativity and communication.
Fenti has chosen to use AI where there is a clear practical benefit rather than treating it as a replacement for the people already doing the work. Research and admin tasks are two areas where they believe it can save considerable time. The agency’s content writers also use AI as a research aid, particularly when getting to grips with unfamiliar or highly technical industries, but a usage agreement in place draws a line when it comes to the content that ultimately reaches an audience.
“We’re still very much of the view of human-for-human consumption of content,” Mark says. “We’ve stuck by that since AI exploded. Human content will always rank and work better for our clients’ websites.”
Elaine is similarly wary of confusing quantity with quality. “In the time it takes to write one piece, you could probably produce 20 using AI. But if those 20 pieces aren’t going to have anywhere near the same ranking potential for a client, then it’s pointless.”
In other respects, the fundamentals have changed surprisingly little. Elaine still leads the design side of the business alongside two other graphic designers, and the importance she places on high-quality artwork and smart branding goes back to the company’s beginnings.
“We’ve always been keen to push the boundaries with design and branding. We don’t want to keep companies in the same lane; we want to move brands forward and reflect where the business is now and where it wants to be.”
Since its beginnings, Fenti has recorded year-on-year growth and built a client base extending well beyond South Yorkshire. The team has worked with businesses and delivered projects across the US, Australia, Ireland and continental Europe, with much of that international work coming through recommendations and existing client relationships.
However, home is still where the heart is, and both are optimistic about the wider South Yorkshire business landscape. Fenti works across a broad mix of sectors, but Elaine says manufacturing and engineering in particular continue to provide a strong market locally. Despite the pressures facing individual industries, Mark says the prevailing mood among the agency’s clients is one of wanting to push forward rather than retreat.
“From the conversations we have, you don’t get the sense of anyone pulling back. They’re pushing on. They want more work, more leads, more enquiries through the website and more sales through the site.”
For all the clear confidence in the work they produce, Mark and Elaine admit that promoting their own achievements has not always come naturally. That changed, at least for one evening, in December 2025, when the company marked its 15th anniversary by entering the unLTD Business Awards for the first time and bagging the Best Creative Business trophy.
“We know we do a phenomenal job for our customers, but we don’t really shout about it,” Mark says. “We just get on and do the work and do the best that we can. Then we thought, ‘We’re 15 years in. Shall we just do it and go for it?’”
Elaine put together the application, and neither appears to have gone into the evening expecting to win. “We were like, ‘Oh my God! What do we say?’” she laughs, recalling the moment their name was announced.
Once the initial surprise had sunk in, their thoughts quickly turned to the team. Mark remembers posting in the work group that evening to make sure those who weren’t there knew the award belonged to them too. “I just said, ‘This is credit to you guys. You’re the people who have assisted us along this journey.’”
And they have no intention of slowing that journey. The plan is to continue expanding the team and developing services, with software development among the areas they see growing in the years ahead. AI will inevitably form part of that future too, although on their own terms, with technology used where it makes the work better rather than simply because it is available.
For Elaine, whatever changes over the coming years, the staff who make up Fenti will remain at the heart of proceedings. “I think anybody that’s ever worked with us knows that we’re genuine and hardworking. We’re very careful in our selection of staff; they’re experts in their field and committed to what they do. That’s what we’re most proud of.”
