Hello Europe. Creative Diary.

Of all the adventures we've been lucky enough to embark upon over the last 15 years, one of the ones that has been most fun and fulfilling has been working with some of our friends in Europe.

That's why for us, and I know for a lot of other folk, the Brexit process has been both sad and painful.

But anyway, enough of the dreaded B word... on to the good stuff.

When we started the studio we always had ambitions to work outwith Scotland and the UK, initially as it seemed like a bit of a dream and we wanted to see if it might be possible.

When we were working with our friends at Young Scot in Edinburgh (an amazing organisation who do so many great things) we got the opportunity to pitch some work for the European Youth Card Association in Brussels. It was a very exciting thing indeed. Straight away on hearing the news, we booked our flight out to see them and say hello.

They were considering other agencies, but we thought we would be a great fit so we pulled together a proposal.

Sadly, we lost the pitch.

The feedback was that they loved our work and attitude but there was another company they were giving it to. We found out that they were a larger agency and sadly at the time it was common for us to lose out in these processes to bigger companies who seemed to have more people and resource to throw at new business pitches.

We've always been seen as friendly folk but I think we lacked the killer instinct when it came to selling ourselves, and other agencies were (and still are) a lot more sales oriented in their approach to winning new business.

That's never been our bag and never will be (I'll do a pitching related post soon, before these little diary entries end).

So anyway we lost, and we were gutted.

Fast forward almost a year and we popped on to the EYCA website to see what they had done with the new brand, and we noticed to our surprise that nothing had changed. That's strange we thought. Even stranger - the next day after we checked the website out we got an email from them. Sadly their other partnership hadn't worked out the way they had hoped and they wondered if we might still be interested in the project.

Hell yes, we said. And that's when our Europe adventure began.

Strange how these things pan out sometimes. 

We jumped straight into it with energy and enthusiasm and worked with the team to create a new brand for both the Youth Card and the Association itself.

As projects go, this was one we were mega proud of with the youth card reaching 7 million young Europeans across 30 different countries. It was such a great opportunity, and what's more the people we got to work with were amazing. We loved it a lot.

And when the project launched, it marked the start of a great relationship with the EYCA crew, and over the coming years we got involved speaking at conferences and delivering workshops in places across Europe including Brussels, Poland, Portugal, France, Spain, Czech Republic & Slovenia. Through this initial project we also got the chance to re-brand the youth card in Andorra leading to work with the Council of Europe and Digital Europe.

One of the initiatives we have been most proud to be part of was delivering a couple of youth-led campaigns for EYCA and the European Parliament - where we developed a campaign encouraging young people to vote in the European Elections. The success of this then led to a youth activation campaign StandForSomething, where we worked with a group of talented young people to encourage Europe's Youth to get involved with issues that mattered to them.

As well as providing us with amazing travel and creative opportunities, the things we loved about these projects was the chance to learn from and be inspired by many talented young people. It's experiences like these that make the work we do so worthwhile, and that's why youth led work will always remain important to Jamhot as we develop the studio in the coming years.

The other thing we learned is about pitches. I guess we could have nailed the opportunity earlier by being more sales focussed, but that's just not who we are. People often say that we're too honest and don't talk ourselves up enough, and I think in some cultures that is required more than others. But the one thing this experience taught us (as well as a couple of other times it happened too - losing a pitch only to get appointed by the same client a little while later) is that you just need to be true to what you believe and how you do things. Sometimes that will fit with clients, sometimes maybe not. But when it does stick and you find clients who love what you do and how you do it - we find that the work is always excellent and the process always interesting.

But if we could change one thing... it's that dreaded B word.

Brexit is, in our humble opinion, a total disaster and offers nothing to creative companies like us. So we're happy that our European friends continue to collaborate with us, something we'll never take for granted. And as we plan the future of our studio, we see lots of exciting opportunities continuing to come from this amazing part of the world - regardless and despite of what chaos might be going on within the UK. 

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Graeme's writing this little creative diary as we celebrate running Jamhot for 15 years and look towards what the future of our creative & design studio holds. We're writing these for our own amusement, but if you do find yourself reading along then a big hello to you.