This month, unLTD sat down with friends and business partners, Carl Foster and Gareth Scott. The pair met at a design agency over twenty years ago, and while their careers forked in different directions, eventually both Gareth and Carl ended up working freelance out of a shared space. It was here they decided to amalgamate their industry experience and Foster & Scott, a Sheffield-based creative agency, was born.
Starting from the beginning, what kinds of work were you both involved in?
GS: I was a Senior Designer and Carl was Studio Manager. I’d always been a creative and had that technical ability in terms of digital elements. I’d been involved in website design, learning software and things like UX.
CF: I initially came from a print background; I worked at Rosehill Press in Rotherham for ten years, so I had a lot of experience in the print side of things. I was also more involved in project management and making sure the deadlines were hit. I touched on a bit of photography as a bit of a sideline as well.
Were there any key takeaways from those starting roles?
GS: We learnt a lot back then, how to correctly manage projects and most importantly how to treat your staff well. Previous experiences taught us that this is key to getting the best out of employees. All our staff are really integral to what we do, we’re a close-knit team.
CF: Exactly, to have good relationships with people, we’ve never expected people to stay till 1 in the morning like we may have done in the past. If a director of a business is asking staff to stay till 11 o’clock at night to get a project done, then somethings gone wrong in our eyes. Just to manage efficiently and properly was a big takeaway.
What was the catalyst to set up together then?
CF: Gareth had left the agency we both worked at, and I decided to stay on longer. Eventually we both ended up freelancing for a while, but I had kids on the way so I couldn’t work from home. After a chance discussion, we got a small office in business centre to work in, doing our own projects.
GS: We then carried on working for ourselves for the following year. It got to the point where one of us would be really busy and needing some help. We just thought, let’s join forces and put everything together. We wanted to get back to a traditional agency with an authentic viewpoint and a traditional name resonated with that.
CF: It just made sense, collectively we’ve got a really good skill set and over 25 years’ experience.
Do you still have those traditional values in the business?
GS: We’ve been around for 12 years now, and we’ve grown organically. We never wanted to be pushy, we’ve always got projects in and do a quality job. From day one we’ve said if we were to grow, we would always remain the point of contact.
CF: Since day one we’ve been quite hands on and we still are, we’re still creating and communicate directly with clients, and we enjoy it. If we’d have stepped away and let the studio do all the work, then the communication breaks down between client and studio. We’re not silent partners, clients can call up an
d speak to us, they understand it’s our business, we’re passionate and we’re on top of it.
Who are some of the local brands that you’ve worked with?
GS: Fairfield Engineering, Edwin Jagger and Gripple just to mention a few.
CF: There’s William Wright we worked with as well, a boutique manufacturer of cutlery and silverware, one of the last in Sheffield down Kelham Island.
So are a lot of your clients international?
GS: Yes, so our biggest client is Exclusive Networks, they’re possibly one of the biggest distributors in the world of cyber security and cloud specialists with an almost 5-billion-euro turnover. We rebranded them back in 2020 and we built their sites which we still look after and maintain. We also do work for Cribl and Culture AI, which are some of our other tech clients.
What are the industries that are your sweet spot?
GS: We have predominantly done work in leisure, cyber security, cloud, IT and digital transformation businesses. We can adapt to any sort of client, there’s no particular area that we want to position ourselves and stay in. Digital transformation is a growing sector and its just so happened that our business has evolved like that.
CF: We also work with private schools, Grosvenor Casinos and Mecca Bingo. It’s a mixed bag really; we’ve got such a wide skill set that we can really adapt.
How do you stay on top of skills to make sure that you’re moving with the times?
CF: We’ve got a varied team in terms of ages, which is a strong point. We all pick up on new things all the time.
GS: Every day is a school day, and we keep on top of it. We all feed off and learn off each other. It’s a bit of a collective in that way, we’re all learners and teachers.
What are the benefits to having that studio and collective environment?
GS: It gives us the ability to be agile and tactile. We might be working on different projects, but we’ll always get together and analyse them. We’re creatives at the end of the day and our ethos is very much that there’s no I in team.
CF: The reason that we are good at what we do is because it’s not just Gareth who’s great at something, it’s not just me, it’s not just Beth – we’re great because we’re a team. We get the best out of everybody collaboratively, and we can really fine tune everything.
Is there anything in the imminent future of your business that you think might affect your industry or anything that you are broadening into?
CF: I’m seeing AI as a positive tool, it speeds up processes, it allows people to be creative, but It won’t give you the final product – you’ll still need someone to manipulate and create that final product.
GS: If you turn around and say AI is a load of rubbish, you’ll get left behind. The web is a big part of our business and all our clients last year who we’ve created websites for, we’ve moved them onto Cloudflare. That’s a new technology that mitigates the risk for websites to be targeted and hacked. Technology is there to be used.
If you’d like more information on Foster & Scott or to see some of their previous projects visit www.fosterandscott.com.
