People often ask us how Picture Smiths began.
Back in 2010, Alex started working as a freelance designer, being somewhat disillusioned with an agency job he’d fallen out of love with. Freelancing allowed him to rekindle his lifelong passion for design by working on some great localised branding work. The work began to need more of a marketing focus and so we joined forces as freelancers to collaborate on a couple of these jobs. At the time, I was taking a break from my marketing career, from a role that hired and partnered with creative agencies, to focus on looking after my three young children under five!
These early project collaborations were immediately successful; we discovered we had great synergy working together and we saw fantastic results, whilst having fun along the way. A couple of clients turned into a handful and we quickly realised there was potential for more. We spotted an opportunity to offer smaller businesses a blend of our skills; design and creative copywriting, teamed with brand know-how, strategy and marketing ideas. Whilst this was a familiar offering by larger creative agencies, we felt a personal approach on a smaller scale was missing in the local market.
In Spring 2011 ‘Picture Smiths’ was formed. The name was chosen since ‘pictures’ are at the heart of everything we do; an idea, a word, a sketch, a photograph or a notion. ‘Smiths’ a play on the nostalgic synonym for craftsmen and coupled with ‘Picture’ positioned perhaps a ‘workshop’ or ‘idea-works’ type feel. In the early days of Picture Smiths, we worked as a duo around our kitchen tables and held meetings in local coffee shops, learning quickly how to run a business on our feet.
Much of our clientele was in hospitality back then, including Eric’s Restaurant, Bolster Moor Farm Shop and Yummy Yorkshire and we’re proud to still be working with some of those today, some 14 years on. The business built year on year, working with more clients, from an increasingly diverse range of industries. Eventually the time came when we needed some additional support by adding to our creative team. This meant that the kitchen table office was no longer viable and so we opened our first premises at 38 North Road, Kirkburton, in 2013. This has been our home for the last decade. Our first employee, Rachel, started work with us in 2014 and still works with us today, in the very heart of our studio. We are now a much larger team of talented creatives, including designers, copywriters, content creators and digital specialists.
We are super proud to have built the business from its very humble roots, and extremely grateful to be surrounded by a brilliant network of clients, professional service providers and an extremely hard-working and creative team. Today our client list includes businesses at all different stages of their journey, from small start-ups, to large internationals and they are based all over, both in the UK (lots in Yorkshire!) and overseas.
People do often ask us how we knew one another in the first place. The answer is we are related! (If you look closely, you may just see a resemblance or a shared mannerism or two…). So Picture Smiths is a family run business, much like many of our clients along the way.
