Fast forward to 2025! We’re now a 360-degree creative agency, working with global brands and licensee clients across publishing, toy, LBE and lifestyle – and in multiple product categories. The team has grown, internally and collaboratively, adding new people, experiences and skillsets in response to a steadily growing client base.

Our services now include product development, IP creation, style guides, illustrated assets, brand extensions, complete creative book packaging, 3D animation and full location-based creative support.

And how did that offering evolve over time?
The aim was to build a flexible and useful business with the ability to offer creative solutions for any projects our clients sent our way. I’m proud to say that we’ve developed a reputation for delivering great results, no matter the type, style, size, complexity or schedule. Providing stability, income, opportunity and purpose for the Dynamites – as our team members are affectionately known – were some of the core drivers of business growth…

We spend a lot of time developing new business, visiting clients face to face and attending multiple relevant UK and international trade fairs. Then, in response to the growth of digital 3D and animated original content – and subsequent demand from licensors and manufacturers for 3D based style guides, concepts, assets and product development – we acquired a 3D animation studio 10 years ago…

Ah, yes!
That’s headed up by Dan our 3D man! It’s been instrumental in our providing cutting-edge, cost-effective creative solutions for many clients, whether for storytelling, product and model building, character development, 3D turnarounds, asset creation or promotional marketing… In fact, the people we’ve added to the team over the years have had a huge positive impact on our evolution. Key people like Alex our Creative Director and Claire and Jeremy our Publishing Managers, who really helped supercharge the whole team. And of course, Gill, my wife and our Operations and Finance Director, who keeps all the essential cogs turning so we can run at full speed.

What’s been key to the studio’s longevity?
It’s a mix of factors… Providing consistently good service, establishing those long-term relationships, built on trust and shared values, and keeping a close eye on the pennies. It’s also about not being afraid to try new ways of working and developing skills for new areas of business. We’ve also evolved due to several amazing collaborative partnerships, as with Rainbow Productions and Fi O’Malley from Making Things. All have been richly rewarding from both a personal and business development point of view.

Tell us a little more about them!
The Rainbow collaboration has seen us gain a growing client base in the international LBE industry, while Fi continues to be a great source of experience and inspiration for co-developing new IP and servicing our toy-industry clients. Latterly we’ve also established a unique relationship with another creative agency: Watermelon Creative…

You’re working together as United Creatives…
Exactly right. We offer an even broader creative skillset, allowing us to work with real authenticity across all genres and sectors. We’ve already collaborated on a number of successful projects and we hope this will lead to many more. It’s definitely all about the people you enjoy working with and the relationships you build along the way.

With that in mind, it made sense to bring industry consultant Maggy Harris on board to help with new business development in early 2020. Maggy helps keep me sane, which is very important too!

Ha! And what are some of the big industry changes over the past 20 years?
The pace of change has been the biggest challenge. Economic and social ups and downs… From the banking crashes and recessions to the advancements in smartphone and computer technology, through to the latest US tariff rules… Covid and its aftermath saw massive changes at retail, affecting expectations, buying habits, product relevance and volumes – and therefore budgets available for creative.

And what’s in-store for the next 20 years?
We’ll continue to hone our craft and keep producing great creative for exciting products and projects – all while maintaining our reputation for delivering a collaborative and friendly service to all new and existing clients. Thank you to all who’ve been on this journey with us and here’s to the next 20 years of Dynamo!

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Maggy Harris, New Business Development Consultant, Dynamo: I think we’re stronger working collaboratively and it’s always good to explore new ideas. Dynamo had a lot of work on, so I suggested Steve have a chat with Sarah. Watermelon Creative and Dynamo are similar businesses and Sarah and Steve both have a great reputation and industry respect… Importantly, the skill sets of the two independent studios are very complementary. It made a lot of sense.

Steve Richards, MD, Dynamo: Our business has expanded from the moment we started. We’ve always tried to offer a broad spectrum of services. It’s been a relationship-based approach, rather than looking at things from a job-by-job basis. We want Dynamo to be a creative support service for whatever our clients need.

“United Creatives offers clients a one-stop solution that elevates the creative output we can deliver.”

When Sarah and I first started talking, we realised we had quite a few clients in common. We were being asked to pitch for the same jobs… We thought, instead of an ‘either/or’, we could offer something where a client’s requirements could be serviced more efficiently by the Dynamo and Watermelon Creative collaboration – and that’s what United Creatives is.

Sarah: Although there are synergies, we have different expertise and are known for different things. Some clients work with both of us, but in different ways. United Creatives offers clients a one-stop solution that elevates the creative output we can deliver.

Does this reflect what creative studios need to offer today to be competitive?
Sarah: If you genuinely collaborate, you can achieve exciting, innovative and unexpected solutions – and an outcome of greater depth than you’d achieve on your own.

It’s important to stress that Dynamo and Watermelon Creative both still exist as separate studios and separate businesses. So, what sort of projects make sense for United Creatives?
Sarah: United Creatives offers a new vision; we deliver creative materials that drive excitement and are 100% designed with commercial return in mind for the brand owners. It might be a client has a new brand or an evergreen favourite and they want fresh vision and a contemporary creative strategy.

“Good creative is indispensable to commercial success in this industry.”

They may still come to Dynamo or Watermelon Creative for creative skills they’ve always used us for, but they can use United Creatives collectively to holistically launch and build their brands in the right way. It’s not just about crafting beautiful style guides; it’s a more rounded offering.

Steve: It’s particularly relevant for evolving sectors that are newer to licensing, such as Museums and Heritage, Sport and Location-Based Entertainment. Our collective skillsets bring a vast array of creative competencies to a client’s disposal but with one point of contact rather than many.

Maggy: Good creative is indispensable to commercial success in this industry. It’s the life blood of licensing. United Creatives wants to provide a different way of doing things via this one-stop shop – covering everything from asset and IP creation, to live events and experiential services. We want to help bring some energy back to the industry and elevate quality.

“It’s not just about crafting beautiful style guides; it’s a more rounded offering.”

Sarah: It’s not easy for anybody in the industry right now, but by thinking about things differently – and working in a new collaborative way – together we can support our partners to move the market forward.

Steve: To be competitive today, brands need to use every tool in the creative toolkit; and United Creatives has a very large toolkit! There isn’t an area we can’t help licensors or licensees with… And the other important thing to say is the fact we can collaborate gives you an indication of how well our teams mesh and trust each other.

To wrap up, let’s dive into a case study! United Creatives recently crafted a series of brand toolkits for Historic Royal Palaces. Talk us through the project.
Maggy: The Point.1888, together with Historic Royal Palaces, wanted to expand the brand’s reach outside of their own retail. The brief was to inspire licensing partners to think of their brand as a true international franchise, with real opportunity outside of the souvenir and gift shop market.

Our pitch to them was… You’ve got 1,000 years of incredible history, so many options and so much material that it would be impossible to encapsulate the brand in a single guide. Let’s create a series of ‘collectible and interchangeable’ toolkits with ownable assets and masses of product and packaging inspiration. Historic Royal Palaces’ USP is actually their Unique Story Point rather than any one Unique Selling Point. The resulting creative guides have authentic, beautiful storytelling at their heart.

Steve: The heritage sector is an exciting area for us to explore because there’s a tendency for brands in that sector to follow a similar creative route. There’s a huge opportunity to look at the sector from a different perspective and thereby create exciting new branding solutions.

From a brand perspective, Historic Royal Palaces needed a really strong, core brand identity for licensing. What they have is thousands and thousands of stories – and thousands and thousands of visual representations of those stories. These provided the foundation for multi-purpose toolkits threaded together by a strong brand visual identity.

Sarah: What we identified and focused on is creative stories to engage consumers across key product categories, taking our inspiration from what is currently working at retail, trend forecasts – and Historic Royal Palaces’ brief – to provide unique, usable assets for licensees. We created three initial toolkits: Iconography, Elegance in Excess and Palace Stories. Each is aimed at different sections of the market and each focused on different stories.

Steve: A single style guide doesn’t always help brand building in any meaningful way… What United Creatives brought to Historic Royal Palaces is a new voice and design language. It will be continually used and expanded upon to give The Point.1888 and the Historic Royal Palaces brand teams the platform – and consistency of assets – to use globally.

It’s not just a style guide, it’s a practical retail and licensee-friendly brand and asset archive that can be added to for years to come.

It’s a cracking example. Thanks so much guys.

The post Sarah Swindell, Maggy Harris and Steve Richards on Watermelon Creative and Dynamo’s new collaboration: United Creatives appeared first on Brands Untapped.

The partnership will see Making Things and Dynamo create and develop original global IPs, each designed with licensing in mind.

“This partnership has been a decade in the making,” said Fi O’Malley, Innovation & Design Director at Making Things Studio.

“We’ve worked in so many different facets together over the years, from client to agency, creator to producer and the last few years, co-consulting. More than ever ‘ideas’ need to be super-charged with invention, innovation and creativity – and that creativity needs to work harder, do more, go further and dig deeper to deliver impact and disruption.

“I’m so excited to work with the talent of Dynamo on this next stage of our collaborations. Our inhouse original IPs are already giving us both so much joy. I’m amped to get pitching!”

The partnership also includes collaborating on full-stack client projects to supercharge ‘story to shelf’ brand creation and bolstering the innovation process with their ‘dream and do’ philosophy – taking concepts, applying design strategy and turning them into commercially viable assets that all in-house departments can utilise.

Dynamo MD Steve Richards added: “Having worked for and with Fi on a host of different projects over the last 10 years, we are so excited to be doing it again in a more truly collaborative way.

“Making Things Studio’s imagination and enthusiasm is brilliant, infectious and it’s supercharging our own abilities in the areas of IP, brand and product creation. From ‘concept to creation’ has never been so true – or meant so much – as it does now with the partnership between Dynamo Limited and Making Things Studio.”

Dynamo Limited and Making Things Studio will be debuting their new IPs this year to potential licensing partners. To get in touch to discuss how this partnership could spark opportunities for your business – or to be on their pitch roster for new IP and inventions – email Steve at steve@dynamolimited.com or Fi at fi@makingthings.studio.

The post Dynamo and Making Things join forces to develop original IP appeared first on Brands Untapped.

In one of my first jobs, I worked as a designer in a small marketing and advertising agency who had some really high-profile brands as clients, like Ford, Volvo and Redken, the haircare and cosmetics brand. This was my introduction to brands, the rulebooks that had to be followed when working with them and the importance of respecting brand identity at all times!

“Our regular clients know they can pick the phone up and no matter what creative needs they have, we are always there to support them.”

We worked a lot in the trade press where everything was quite dry and lacking humour, but then got the chance to work on a campaign for a car leasing company who really wanted to stand out as something different and unique compared to the competition. Our proposal was based on a series of illustrations highlighting their particular USPs in a humorous way, giving their prospective customers the chance of ‘winning’ the original artworks.

Working with a copywriter and cartoonist and illustrator, Graham Thompson – who has since created the WASGIJ? Puzzle art for Jumbo – we came up with ‘creative’ interpretations of the USPs. It was a really fun project to work on and the combination of humorous but impactful storytelling in both words and pictures not only worked brilliantly but also got me hooked. All I needed to then do was find a job and area of the industry that meant I could do a whole lot more of the same!

And that led you to CLiC!?
Yes, I saw an advert for Studio Manager at CLiC! – The Character Licensing Illustration Company! Run by Mick Wells, who a lot of people will know.

CliC! was an independent creative services studio working exclusively with brands and characters. I think I got the job because when Mick ran through their portfolio I could name every character in there – being a big kid at heart actually counted as a positive, and hopefully still does!

“We’re storytellers, and telling stories is at the root of creativity in our industry, even when it comes to brands that aren’t character driven.”

Around 80% of the work we did – at least in the early years until ‘Turtles’ hit and took over the world – was with Disney. In those days, style guides didn’t really exist in the form we know now, so all you got to work with was a logo and some animation sketches. Everything we worked on had to be created from scratch, whether that was original character art, creative direction and styling, themes and product concepts.

It was hard work, but we had a great relationship with Disney’s UK team and we worked really closely and collaboratively with licensees developing bespoke ideas, products and graphics that were pretty much unique every time. The Nineties were an incredibly creative and fun time to be involved in the industry.

You now run your own creative studio in Dynamo. I’m looking at your line-up of services and you guys do so many different things – project management, packaging, animation, character design, style guides, concept creation… the list goes on! So, here’s a tough one, how would you describe Dynamo in a nutshell?
Ha, it is a tough question and whenever we’re asked, we tend to say we do pretty much everything – which isn’t always a satisfying answer as it makes it sound like we don’t have specific skills or experience in any one particular area. However, if you look at the work we’ve done over the years, you can see that we have both, in abundance, in all the areas you mention – plus some!

Our aim is to be as creative and ‘useful’ as possible for our many clients, so we’ve developed and adapted our skills and services accordingly. It does mean that we’ve been able to work on a huge range of fantastic, incredibly varied projects over the years and we are constantly learning new skills.

We see it as a real strength, as this means we have transferable skills, experiences and knowledge that can be applied to every project we work on. Our regular clients know they can pick the phone up and no matter what creative needs they have we are always there to support them. Sorry, that’s a pretty big nutshell I know!

No, that’s a great run-down! Expanding on that, what’s a good example of work you’ve done that sums up some of Dynamo’s strengths?
During lockdown we collaborated with Rainbow Productions on character development for a mascot for a major up-coming sporting event. The development process was quite complicated and involved as there were a lot of elements that needed to be considered, including the ability for the character design to work as a mascot costume. We created 3D animated sizzles for the introduction of the character and the event launch, as well as 3D asset art and vector art for the event’s partners and licensees.

During this time we’ve also completed eight new PJ Masks trend guides for eOne, who we’ve been working with for quite a few years now on this and other brands like Peppa Pig and Ricky Zoom.

Again what’s great working with the team there is that we work not only on ever-changing and evolving themes and graphical and illustrative styles for the guides – over 25 different trend guides for PJ Masks so far! We also work right across the board on branding, concepts, presentations, packaging, 3D art and vector art for both the licensor and their licensees.

Our 3D and animation capabilities have also really developed over the last few years and it’s proven to be one of the most useful tools in the Dynamo toolkit, allowing us to support the ever-increasing need for brand owners to create and supply large quantities of complex 3D assets to their licensees. It can also be used to develop and animate product, new concepts and IP, and is invaluable in terms of the impact it creates in promoting and supporting sales and marketing campaigns.

You’ll work on briefs that are packed with creative constraints and some that offer more freedom. Have you got a preference?
We like both; we find the entire creative process challenging, interesting and inspiring. From a Licensor/IP owner perspective, we like projects where we can get involved early on in helping to create the concept, like coming up with IP ideas, story arc, early character development or product visuals. We also like seeing it through every step of the process, from style guides right the way through to working with licensees on their new product development.

“The industry is constantly maturing and growing, meaning that there are more players involved and more people taking the industry seriously.”

We’re storytellers, and telling stories is at the root of creativity in our industry, even when it comes to brands that aren’t character driven. Having a story to tell and constantly reinforcing the consumer messaging is what makes a brand a brand. I think having a strong and clear story means more to people these days because entertainment brands can come and go so quickly.

How key is great design to successful brand extensions?
While great design helps massively, it has to be matched to a story or message of real clarity and quality. That said, ultimately, it’s the consumers that decide what will work and endure. And I love that. It’s not really our choice. It’s humbling!

We always do our best to give any new concept or brand the best possible chance at success in a crowded marketplace with trend-led ideas and design, which in turn helps influence consumer choice.

What helps fuel your creativity?
The continual, ever evolving, creative challenge. Every job is a new challenge, and we approach it like it’s our first. We draw on our experience, and analyse every project on its own merits, asking the right questions and understanding exactly what is involved and the end objective for the client and the brand. The process keeps us on our toes and the creative fires burning. It’s impossible to get complacent but it’s also what makes it fun too!

The other hugely inspiring influence for me is being surrounded by the enthusiastic, brilliantly creative, and diversely experienced ‘Dynamites’ who are at the heart of Dynamo and all the work we do.

‘Dynamites’ – nice! Steve, thanks for taking time out for this. One last question: Do you feel the industry is in a good place creatively at present?
I think it is. The industry is constantly maturing and growing, meaning that there are more players involved and more people taking the industry seriously. Competition is therefore fierce and the intensity and focus in all areas are necessarily rising, as are the quality and creativity of design and product development.

Thanks Steve! Appreciate you making time.

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