“Work hard in ‘our’ way” — by ToyFight ＜vol.6＞

For vol.6, we interviewed  ToyFight, a creative agency based in Manchester, England. Founded approximately two years ago, they are still a small company of fewer than 10 people, but founders Leigh and Jonny are creative directors who both possess overseas work experience. They put their experience at large agencies to work to expand their capabilities beyond the digital realm. Based on their past work experience, we talk to them in detail about how this affects their output.

Question 1：
Please tell us about your company.

Jonny:
We’re a design and technology agency based in Manchester, we (Leigh and Jonny) founded the agency around two years ago. Our roles in the agency are as both Creative Directors, Designers, and Managers.

Leigh:
We currently have seven members of staff (including us) blending design, development, strategy, and management for clients in the US, UK, and Europe.

Question 2：
Please tell us the reason why you guys founded your own agency.

Leigh:
The story itself isn’t that uncommon; we worked at the same agency in Manchester a few years back. We always got on and enjoyed working together. Much of the fun part of that place was the people. Then, after a few years, we both went our separate ways. I left Manchester for an opportunity in New York with a digital agency I’d always dreamt of working for.

Jonny:
And not long after Leigh left I also found myself standing in the middle of New York with my family and a new job too. I promise I wasn’t missing him that much, but it was nice to know he was around.

Leigh:
Yeh, it was weird both being in the same city working at different agencies, yet we hardly met up while both being there. Just each doing our own thing, and occasionally catching up with each other.

Jonny:
When we did catch up we would always talk about our futures though; we were always worried about turning into 60 yr old designers that had no idea what they were doing. We needed to find a long term plan, and I guess that’s why we just started forming the idea of creating our own agency. After all, we had both enough experience from the design side and management side to know how to put the pieces together… at least that’s what we thought.

Leigh:
Yeh, how wrong we both were. It’s a completely different experience setting up your own thing. Anyway, we did it. We both moved back to the UK and as soon as we could we setup our own agency (ToyFight).

Question 3：
What is the most important thing when it comes to hiring people for your company?

Jonny:
Most important thing is attitude for sure. Forget pretty much anything else. Well, not everything obviously. They need to have a certain degree of creative flair, but most of the other stuff like application skills can be taught — in fact that’s exactly one of the things we would be doing as mentors.

Leigh:
Yeh, mentoring the ideas side, presenting side, and also the actual execution “on the tools”. The latter can be taught over time, but an attitude to work can’t really, you need to have that hunger and desire. The way that person behaves and the way that he or she thinks is more important to us as than how good they are at Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever.
Basically, we are too small to have a high staff turnover. We want to help shape younger talent so they can carry some of our agency DNA with them. Bake it into them. That’s our long term aim with anyone who works at ToyFight.

Jonny:
Finding people with the right mentality is important. And being able to help them, and make them better at their job is the most rewarding of all for us.
Yeh, I mean eventually we could step back from hands-on and put our trust in our people at the agency because we know our attitude and spirit is always with them. We could then focus on growing the agency and providing more guidance to staff.

Question 4：
Do you do the pitch? And does clients pay the fee?

Jonny:
Yes, we do pitch, but it’s very rare to get paid for a pitch from our experience. When we were in the States, it was the same case there. It’s also something you can’t really resource around, the time and energy it takes can vary from job to job.

Leigh:
If anything the amount of time you have to spend on both Pitches and RFP’s (request for proposal) is getting more demanding.
For example, It used to be that RFP’s consisted of a written document that was both creative and technical. However, it’s more like a mini pitch; this can include all kinds of visual treatments.

So it’s always like you’re not pitching to win the work now, you’re pitching to win the opportunity to work. It’s so competitive. People are so desperate to win the work, they are spending huge amounts of time/money upfront.

Jonny:
Pitches can be quite risky particularly for a small agency like ours. It’s not easy for us to dedicate two or three weeks of our time to work on it. If you don’t win it, you’ve lost all of that time, effort and money.

Some are even giving the work away to win the pitch. We’ve heard people doing this work for free just so they can say, “We did this brand,” or “We did this project.” It’s for the PR, so they can create a story for their agency and send that out, which is up to them obviously, but again it sets an expectation for others maybe too.

Question 5：
Is there anything you ask about the pitch to the client?

Leigh:
We do ask about who we are pitching against / how many agencies. It’s nice to know who are we going against and the reason we like it is because we are really competitive, so we’d prefer to go against really good places. And there’s something nice about going against big boys. We always liked the idea of being the underdog.

Question 6：
What work process do you follow after you receive the order from client?

Jonny:
We normally get them a super quick rough estimate of cost and time, then after if all is going well, we send over a SOW (Statement of Work) which is basically a formal contract.

Leigh:
Regarding a process of how we work, we do what makes sense for that particular project. We don’t think we have a one-size-fits-all approach to how we produce our work. We just work out what is required and use common sense as opposed to following a set formula. We make our own process for each client every time.

Jonny:
Don’t get us wrong here; we have set things we do. But as Leigh says we don’t rely on it as a template.

Like wireframes, we prefer to have a series of lists and priorities for each piece of work. Then move into more lo-fi working models of the project. It’s pretty rare that we would do static wireframes (unless it was a huge build with many stakeholders). That’s what we ask our client to do, and we think this is an easier thing for them to understand, to write down a list of x to y of what priorities are for this work.

This helps move past big rectangles on a screen and just focusses on the content. Most of the IA architects we have worked seem to spend huge amounts of time replicating what has been successful in the past, rather than innovating for the future.

Leigh:
I suppose that neatly puts forward our position as an agency; it’s on all of us as designers, developers, copywriters, and managers to help shape the UX and innovate. Not any one person.

Jonny:
It’s also way more exciting diving into tools that allow clients and users to interact with it at an early state. You learn so much together it’s a very rewarding process.

IGK

Question 7：
On average, how many projects do company and each person handle at one time?

Jonny:
We can have five or six at any one moment in time, but with varying stages of the process, so one might be in development, one in design, one in discovery. It’s a bit like spinning plates.

Leigh:
We make sure each of our staff doesn’t have any more than two projects that they are working on at a time. If things are all running at the same time, then we try and solve it by bringing in external resource. But more often we stagger our projects so we can have five or six running through the studio.

We try and keep work life balance good, so we promote a healthy appetite to work. If we get to the point where our staff will have to stay late every night, either we’d need to get more staff, or not be so greedy.

Jonny:
Or we need to plan better.


Question 8：
When Do you receive the payment?

Jonny:
That depends. We try and do project based work, which is the most common. We do an upfront payment of 50% with the rest following midway and on completion of the project. If it’s a bigger budget though, you’re probably looking at more split into thirds or quarters, so one-third or one-fourth upfront. We think of it as a good will gesture like, “We are committed to this project, and you are committed to this project.”

Question 9：
Do you allow employees to work remote and have second jobs?

Leigh:
Not from our current team, but we do work with people remotely. We don’t have a hard rule about that. So if we found a person that is a right fit for us, and we felt there wouldn’t be a problem, we’d be happy for them to work remotely.

Jonny:
Regarding second jobs, if they’re doing the same type of job on the side, we would be a bit concerned, and that would bother us a bit. We’d question why they felt the necessity to do another job. If they’re doing something else other than the job they do at work, then it’s their time, so that’s ok.
Also a true “side project” is different and we would actively encourage people to do that.

TISSOT

Question 10：
Finally, what as a company do you believe the most important requirement for doing “good work?”

Jonny:
Having a voice that’s listened to by the people that make the real decisions with a brand or business.

Leigh:
It’s important you can express what you want to do and how you want to do it. Also, having access to a business at that level can be really exciting, especially if you are seeing the ideas move forward.
It’s also really important for clients to trust our experience and expertise, after all that’s hopefully what they have come to us for.

Other works of ToyFight

< wework >

<Keen>

<salomon>

This article was published at the time of release in August 2017.

ToyFight’s SNS account
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