Video calls would replace meetings, remote teams would become the norm and suddenly your next web designer, branding agency or creative agency could be based absolutely anywhere.
Whether you were looking for website design in Kendal or working with a marketing partner hundreds of miles away suddenly seemed irrelevant. Which, to be fair, is partly true. We’ve worked with people all over the country and I certainly don’t miss spending half my life on the M6.
And yet, after more than twenty years working with businesses across Cumbria and the North West, we’ve become increasingly convinced that place still matters. Quite a lot, actually. Not because clients are desperate to pop in every Thursday afternoon for a catch up and a biscuit, although friends of The Creative Branch will know we’re certainly not opposed to biscuits. In fact, since the arrival of our new coffee machine, we’ve become even more welcoming.
The machine itself, however, appears to have all the emotional needs of a Tamagotchi and very strong opinions about a daily pamper routine normally reserved for minor royalty, but it does make a decent flat white and is already proving worth the occasional pilgrimage.
The truth is, understanding a region means understanding the people, businesses and values that come with it, and those things are surprisingly difficult to fake.
Perhaps that’s why one of our clients coined the phrase “flartchery” to describe unnecessary marketing nonsense. It remains one of the finest words we’ve ever heard and, if we’re honest, one that has become surprisingly useful over the years.
Businesses here have always struck us as refreshingly straightforward. They don’t expect miracles. They aren’t interested in grand promises or fashionable buzzwords. More often than not, they simply want sensible advice from people who know what they’re talking about and enough honesty to tell them when something isn’t worth doing. Frankly, so do we.
Some of the most ambitious businesses we know are based right here in Cumbria. Manufacturers exporting around the world. Hospitality businesses welcoming guests from every corner of the UK. Charities creating change on a national scale. Professional services firms competing with organisations many times their size.
Which perhaps serves as a useful reminder that geography and ambition are two very different things.
Over the years, we’ve discovered that expertise travels rather well. Good ideas don’t become better because they’re delivered from a fashionable postcode and creativity isn’t distributed according to proximity to an oat milk flat white, although there are certainly more of those around Cumbria than when we started out.
That certainly doesn’t mean businesses in Cumbria should limit themselves geographically. Great relationships can exist anywhere. But equally, there’s a reason many organisations still prefer working with a web design and branding agency that understands the region they operate in and the customers they’re trying to reach.
What is much harder to replicate is local knowledge.
Not in the obvious sense. Anyone can learn where Kendal is and anyone can claim to offer website design in Cumbria. Google Maps has that covered. But understanding the character of a place, the industries that shape it and the people who call it home takes rather longer.
Take Liz, for example. After years leading hospitality marketing and several generations of family connections in the area, we’ve reached the conclusion that there are only two possibilities. Either Liz knows almost everyone who has ever passed through Cumbria or she knows somebody who does. Mention a hotel, attraction or business and there’s a fair chance she’ll have a story, a connection or, at the very least, know someone who once worked there in 1987.
That kind of knowledge doesn’t appear on a CV, but it does have an uncanny habit of proving useful.
You understand that tourism isn’t just tourism and that manufacturing businesses in West Cumbria face very different challenges from those elsewhere in the country. You know that “just down the road” is more philosophical than geographical and that a sunny Bank Holiday weekend means entirely different things depending on what business you’re in.
Most of those things never appear on a project brief, but they influence the work all the same. Perhaps that’s why the relationships that last tend to be built on shared values rather than convenience. The best projects rarely begin with dazzling presentations or impossibly clever strategy diagrams. More often they start with good conversations, mutual trust and a quiet confidence that nobody is going to subject the room to an hour of unnecessary ‘flartchery’. Running a business is complicated enough.
There’s also something quietly satisfying about driving through Cumbria and spotting brands, websites and businesses you’ve helped shape over the years. From hospitality and tourism businesses in the Lake District to manufacturers, charities and professional services firms across the North West, seeing work stand the test of time never really gets old. Some have evolved. Some have changed ownership. Some have stood the test of time rather better than the hairstyles we were sporting when they were first launched.
But that’s part of the privilege of working somewhere for a long time. You don’t just create things and move on. You watch businesses grow, see ideas mature and become part of the regional story.
And perhaps that’s why so many of our team, including those who weren’t born here, have become enthusiastic adopted Cumbrians. Granted, some of them took a while to stop complaining about the weather and there are still occasional grumbles in February, but they’ve come to appreciate what makes this place special.
And while technology has undoubtedly made the world smaller, people have remained wonderfully, stubbornly local.
Which, we’re increasingly convinced, is no bad thing at all.
