Dusted: The creative design agency that came back better
Dusted are a full-service, strategic branding and digital agency based in London.
Lucy Beacock is their Operations Director who oversees the Client Services team and works with the Leadership team to ensure all things at the award-winning agency run smoothly. We caught up with Lucy to hear how Dusted have fared through the last 2 years of uncertainty.
1. What’s been Dusted’s most significant achievement in the last 2 years?
Simply getting through the pandemic was quite a big thing for us. A lot of companies really struggled and had to lay staff off. But for us, that hasn’t been the case so far (touch wood).
Continuing to make our clients happy and produce great work. That’s the biggest thing for us.
We’re just we’re proud that we’ve managed to soldier on and actually grow throughout the pandemic.
2. Which area of your business received the most change this year?
We’ve been doing a lot more work on Digital Marketing and Managed Services. The Marketing team has been growing too – which is obviously something Gabriele know about.
We’ve also been focussing on building up enterprise clients for a number of years now, and that’s something that’s finally starting to happen for us, which is great.
3. Have your opinions/policies on hybrid working changed?
Remote work is a big part of the discussion within the Dusted leadership team.
We’ve always had a fairly flexible work policy. And because of the way the world is now, hybrid is definitely something that we’ll continue doing and discussing to make sure it works for the team.
We trust people to get the work done.
I think what’s great is that there’s so many tools to make remote working possible now. So yeah, I think it’s been a really good opportunity for us to explore and continually evolve.
4. Have you mainly worked with new or existing clients this year?
We’re really happy to continue working with our current client base. But our brand awareness is increasing and attracting new clients which is great too. I think it’s probably been a bit of a 50/50 split, really, which is great for us.
5. Have you seen a change in the type of projects clients are requesting? (Has this changed from previous years)
Not particularly. We’ve been doing more digitally focussed campaign work recently. A lot of Digital transformation.
6. Is there a particular type of project you’ve worked on most?
A lot of the work we do is brand refresh, rebrands and repositioning. And often that will lead to WordPress web developments and a variety of rollout items: marketing comms etc.
Because we’re a full service agency we can help our clients with anything they need after they’ve done their rebrand or refresh.
7. You mentioned that your new hires are mainly with marketing, is that because it’s becoming more of a focus or simply because of demand?
A bit of both really. We’re evolving, not just in size but the way we work – so we’ve needed more
hires and it’s been great to work with Gabriele because of it.
8. That’s great to hear. And about this recession that’s looming over us… Have you guys planned how you want to navigate it?
Yeah, I think it’s always good to be cautious – as a business. We only employ new people as when we need them etc.
But we can only plan for as much as we can. We can put in contingencies, and we can work with our great clients to plan out our year and get our forecasts aligned. But, I think nobody knows what they don’t know, so we can only continue to keep going.
9. Have you experienced a reduction in client spend?
At the start of the pandemic, there was a tightening of purse strings across the board, and an element of caution across a lot of the clients. But because of the sectors and industries that we work in, a lot of our clients didn’t pull the brakes on everything. They might have cut back a little bit initially, but we’re almost back to pre-pandemic levels now, which is great.
10. Dusted have produced some brilliant work this year. What has been your favourite project?
Well, I mean, we love all our clients, and all our projects. We worked on a brand refresh for Carbon Trust, which was interesting to do, because Net Zero is really important right now. We really felt like we were making a difference.
We won two golds at the Transform Awards for our technology solutions provider client.
We worked with them on a rebrand and website builder. So that was exciting. And we’ve recently just finished a launch with Mahindra who are an independent electric car company. So that’s also been pretty cool for the team as well.
You can find out more about Lucy Beacock and Dusted here.