James Greenfield, CEO and Co-Founder of Koto

0:08Welcome to My Life in Design, brought to you by the DBA and design-focused PR agency, Red Setter. I'm Claire Blythe, co-founder of Red Setter. In this series, I'll be speaking to more people who are shaping the world of design, finding out how they discovered that design was a thing you could base a career around, and how they got to where they are today. So this week, I'm here with James Greenfield, CEO and co-founder of brand and digital agency, Koto. So Koto is a 125-person strong agency, offices around the globe in London, Berlin, Sydney, Shanghai, LA, and New York. James speaks at conferences around the world on brand, regularly speaks in the media.

0:50He's created brands for companies such as Spotify, TripAdvisor, Google, Amazon, Call of Duty, Riot Games, Deezer, WhatsApp, Discord, Skyscanner, Fanta and Coca-Cola. James, welcome to the podcast.

1:04James Greenfield:Thank you very much for having me. Thanks so much for coming on. Can we start sort of right at the beginning? When did you realise design was a thing you could base a career around? Was it when you were a child? Was it when you were older? Where did it start? So yeah, for me, it was an interesting one where I went to a state school in Kent. I was really into art and I had two really good art teachers and you know if you'd asked me when I was in my early teens I probably would have been focusing that way in the world of art in some kind of way and then I got to GCSE and I had to find some work experience and I was probably not as kind of like on it as I should have been and it got quite familiar yeah it got quite close to the deadline and my mum luckily knew somebody that ran a really small graphic design studio in our hometown above of the library.

1:52So were you thinking about graphic design? Did you know it was a thing?

1:54James Greenfield:I had never even like crossed my mind on this thing I think. So she said well you know you're creative you like creative stuff I know this guy he does creative stuff why don't you go scan work there for two weeks and at that point I had this really slightly difficult relationship with school I was undiagnosed dyslexic. Oh really? I just never you know every school report was if only James applied himself he'd be amazing kind of classic and so I kind of went along to this thing and it's without doubt the most life-changing thing that I ever got involved in because I was in this room and it was so anti-school there was some people who were really nice to talk to who were friendly who were creative and we were making stuff which you know wasn't groundbreaking I was making leaflets for the local council yeah but it was like this light bulb went off in my head about the fact that everything's designed and I just had never ever really thought about it properly before and spent two weeks there and there was the the boss who kind of did all the new business and organized everything and then this guy who did all the work on the mac and i was also really into computers as well and so therefore there was something that really like suited my creative side of my brain but also the technical side of my brain yeah and so in the two weeks there i taught myself to use illustrator taught myself to use quark express rip quark express i remember doing a course from there and can't get them in trouble doesn't exist anymore They also gave me the software to put on my computer at home, which was amazing because what it meant was I went home and really immersed myself in Photoshop and all these things.

3:25James Greenfield:And it was the two weeks that changed my career. I went from really not really sure. At one point I'd flowed with being an airfighter pilot and classic teenage boy example and was really into art and all these very kind of quite disparate things, really. I looked at the topics. I was really good at at school. and you know I was good at art but I was also good at maths and I was really into history and it was all that there was no obvious path for me through these things yes and so a work experience that changed my life wow that's pretty game-changing it's amazing that's really good but have you still you've since been diagnosed as dyslexic is it at university it happened oh wow that's good that's yeah must it must be so reassuring to know that there's a reason for the way that you're thinking which makes sense of why your brain works yeah completely yeah which I But I don't know, I think I, you could say, could it have been different when I went back through my schooling?

4:17James Greenfield:Probably not. And actually it's part of my story. Yeah. So therefore you just kind of accept it and take it forward. Yeah, it's been all right. Exactly. Yeah, you've done all right out of it. But so we go back, so you would have what, 16 when you did the work experience? 15. 15, that's really, my son's just in work experience when he's 15. I think it's really young to do it. But he absolutely loved it. Yeah. Again, in a design agency. One of the things that I remember I thought was really cool, which I don't think is really cool now, was that they smoked all day long. Oh my God, I remember that.

4:43Everyone had a packet of marble lights on the desk when I first started.

4:46James Greenfield:And so everyone was smoking all day long and I was like, there's these people, they're swearing, they're smoking, there's music playing and I get to be on computers all day long and I'm doing creative stuff. What is not to like? Yeah, and you get paid for it. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Definitely. Sign me up. That is quite amazing. That's a, yeah, really clever way. So you did the week's work experience and then went back to school and thought, this is what I want to do. And so I talked to my art teachers and said, I've done this. This was great. And my art teachers were already pushing me towards a foundation course.

5:21James Greenfield:And they were like, honestly, go do your foundation. And I was really lucky, actually, because my art teachers were quite out there, even more out there than normal art teachers. And so I actually did sculpture all the way through GCSE and A-Level. Wow, really? And so we had a really forward thinking for just like a normal state school again. Yeah, I wish we had done that. And, you know, my art teachers encouraged us to go to the art room whenever we had spare time. Yeah. Because it was a nice environment to be. Yeah. And, you know, there was loads of books on sculpture and lots of like stuff.

5:54And it was at that time that the new kind of British artists were coming through and the Sensation show was on. Wow, okay.

6:02James Greenfield:So my art teachers took us up to see sensation as well, which I remember being a real like, wow, yeah, moment of like, this is amazing. Like, you know, So which artist was that? So there's Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, all of the young British artists that came through in the late 90s. And so there was interesting, actually, as well, because there was something very provocative and cultural about what they were doing as well. And it's obviously Tony Blair is coming into power at that time as well. And so therefore change was in there. And so it just felt like going to art college at that period in time was you know it felt like I was going along with what was happening in culture and things were changing and you know the 90s was a very exciting time on that front gosh I think it's kind of it's a bit depressing isn't it but it's kind of hard to imagine that now I imagine sort of teenagers in the same sort of situation now it's hard it's hard to imagine that feeling of optimism and change that was in the air at that point yeah it was very like you know I think it's easy to be down on the country and where we live and everything now but yeah at that point that was not the case at all it felt like you know possibility was out there and you could go and get it yeah completely so where did you go for your foundation so i went to foundation in kent uh local art college and i can remember day one was absolutely they the the teachers there decided to de-programmers and they kind of sat as in a lecture theater and i was like i was gonna get lectured out all day and uh they proceeded to show us three films and i remember walking out stumbling out kind of like into the light you kind of that feeling of when you come out and yeah it's been in the cinema and your eyes are like that and i was like well that's me changed forever and as we watched a razorhead by david lynch which i'd never really watched anything like that before in my life i've never seen that uh and at that point i worked in a video shop as well so therefore it was quite interesting to me to realize that there was films that a small video shop in a tiny town in kent didn't stock uh yeah everyone's coming in to rent cliffhanger and actually there's other films like yeah that exist right i'm writing this down they need to watch this don't i uh and then they showed us one of the films they showed us which i've never seen since and i don't know who it's by was a artist who had filmed their own penis singing uh uh staying alive by the bg's that's awesome and i just remember being like what what the actual what on earth is going on and and so and you could tell they were like trying to take in many cases these very sheltered kids from like rural ken or small town ken put them in a room and go the world is very different than you think it is and so and but the thing that's really interesting is it confused the hell out of me because you're meant to do all these different weeks of all these things on foundation and you're meant to go oh that's definitely the one i wanted to do yeah by the end of the first term i wanted to be a fashion designer a product designer a graphic designer a fine artist and i wanted to get involved in film and because they were the things that we'd all done and i thought all of them were awesome yeah so i we had to choose a specialism for the the second term and it was impossible i found it so hard to choose what did you do graphic design so that was where they but i kind of because i felt that because i'd wanted that for two years previously yeah but i really flirted with the rest of that god it's so interesting isn't it it's that sliding doors thing isn't it if you're just joking with a slight decision different way koto wouldn't exist yeah yeah it's really interesting it's uh so that was year-long foundation course I wish I had done a foundation course I just it's one of those things you look like it looks like the most fun year ever it would be amazing yeah I think for me as well where I've grown up in an environment where it's a great place to grow up but as a teenager who was creative it wasn't a great place after a while yeah and so there was two copies of the face magazine came into our newsagents one was mine and one was someone else's I never knew who the other persons was but I always wanted to know yeah who else in the town of 5 ,000 people was buying face definitely what a magazine yeah but it was you know I was only an hour from London but it could have been another world yeah and so it was amazing for me to have this ability that these things that I'd only ever looked at in magazines and you know pre-internet here and then suddenly I was like and I would go to London and you know I'd walk around the shops and I would go to art galleries and we'd go to like gigs and stuff yeah and you know I can remember that feeling of seeing like you know there's culture here I can feel it but then going to an art college where you're in a room or building full of other people that are interested in the same stuff as you're interested in whereas I'm went to a boys school where about six people were interested in the same stuff as I was interested in yeah and so that was like that was like revelatory for me definitely did you go and see the face exhibition recently at the national portrait gallery oh it was amazing I need to see it it's so evocative many good things on in London that's the trouble yeah yeah totally you can't see everything so where did you go what do you go next so I went to Bath to do uh my degree and i always knew i'd end up in london and so i felt like it was good for me to go somewhere else and i felt similar actually i would delete for that reason but i did i'm so lazy this is really embarrassing i basically wrote a list of all the art colleges that i was going to go and visit and the first thing we did was my friend and is now a well-known artist mr bingo him and i yeah as a pair of idiot 18 year olds to drive to falmouth to look at it and this and had planned out that we would stop at Bath, drive on to Falmouth, turn around and then drive back.

11:19James Greenfield:It's actually impossible in a day. I don't know what on earth we're thinking we're doing. Got to Bath, looked around Bath and thought, this looks good and then went home. And it was just the most, and then never went and looked at any others because it was just like, oh, that's the one we want to go to. You're right though, it did look good and it must have been an amazing place to go to university. It was, it was good, but in terms of dedicated research, it was appalling. I give myself one out of 10 for my research. Fair enough. Did he go there as well? Brilliant. So we both went to the same foundation and we went to the same university, like a pair of simpletons.

11:51Have you visited his shop in Quarganwell?

11:53James Greenfield:Yes, I've been to the shop many times. Yeah, of course. It's really cool, isn't it? Yes, it is. He's doing very good stuff. He's doing very well. So three years in Bath. Yeah. How was that? Did you enjoy it? Was it fun? One of the things I was very lucky with about a university was, A, it was an amazing place to go to university because it was a good size. And in those days, it's not there anymore. Sadly, we had this little campus up on the hill and you lived in the first year in this old Crescent, which was just an incredible place to live. Someone at some point realised economically, actually, we can make millions out of this and we'll probably sell it off.

12:25James Greenfield:And it had this amazing little building out the back. And so it was quite small, nice community vibes. And Bath itself was big enough for most student things. And if you really want to go and do anything else, you go to Bristol or London very easily. um but because i'd done all the work experience and i had the software i knew all the software and so where most people are trying to teach themselves the software at the beginning i could just get on with the ideas and immersing myself in other things um and so that meant i was really lucky at university because it meant that i could spend time in the computer room working on stuff yeah the downside of it was that everyone was constantly asking me how to do things on the computer every day was like can you try to do this you're gonna be able to do that yeah good for making friends yeah there's no problem on that front so how did you how did you finish at university was it how did basically how did you get your first role was it through your interview university but towards the end my mind had started to go to what was next and back in those days there was a thing called director which was a cd-rom program which kind of pre i feel very old all of a sudden predated flash which is also dead so there we go yeah and I taught myself that and I built this kind of portfolio on some cd-roms and I went through alumni from my college because we'd had a really good visiting lecturer system where yeah came to talk and one talk had been from a company called deep end which doesn't exist anymore and so I had basically contacted them I lined lined up an internship for pretty much straight after uni yeah and then I was kind of coming towards the end I was like focusing on my final major project getting everything done and I got an email saying that Deep End had gone into administration and my plan was blown and so I had sent loads of other CD-ROMs out and so I kind of followed up with all of those and there's a company called Harriman Steel which still exists now which was started by a couple of Bath graduates and luckily I got an internship there and so did most people use cd-roms at that point or was that quite a different approach most people were still in print portfolios in those days yeah that's kind of what i was thinking yeah i had a print portfolio as well but like it was a way of getting stuff to people i almost think the other way around now that if you want to get someone's attention i think sending a print portfolio is actually quite a good idea yeah i don't know i've always i've always been wary of gimmicks i think like i quite like a gimmick it's all because yeah the worst thing that ever happened was that's the worst thing that's ever happened to a massive exaggeration a weird a weird thing that happened once is that someone turned up at our studio with a cake you know like a delivery uniform yeah the cake across and uh we were like okay fine who's this cake from can I put it on the side it's like so weird and anyone that's ever worked in a design studio put a piece of food like that in the middle of it within 20 minutes is being eaten by somebody yeah and uh I get this email later saying, I'm not really a cake delivery driver.

15:20James Greenfield:I'm a designer and I've just delivered my portfolio in cake format. And everyone was like, everyone had eaten it. Yeah, everyone had eaten the portfolio. That's hilarious. And it was like, what do you mean you've delivered your portfolio in cake format? Like, what does that even mean? What does it mean? And so that's like, I don't know. So that's like an extreme version of like, and basically the portfolio was in the box and someone had just gone like, throw it away, eat the cake. and so I think so that's why and we deviate but that's why I'm not into gimmicks I think ends up happens is someone will eat your portfolio yeah even get a chance that's a lovely idea but don't do something with a cake next to it though the cake will clearly be better than your portfolio yeah and so yeah I uh sent these out and luckily enough they gave me a chance and so I put all my stuff in a van and moved to London and moved to the Isle of Dogs which is somewhere if someone's listening that's never been to London the Isle of Dogs is not the place you move to it's just a bit weird but it was brilliant well certainly not in the late 90s and early 2000s yeah okay yeah definitely I remember being a friend there around that time and probably wasn't the place to live but it was cheap so yeah really cheap that's what happened and we had a river view so you know nice see were you working with the studio there as well or no so the studio was in Clerkenwell nice so I would cycle to Clerkenwell every day and it was a real challenge coming out of self-deterministic university where I was ahead of many other people because I had these technical skills and I had these capabilities and I could kind of do what I wanted and work in my own particular way yeah and being an intern in a studio and I've found it really hard it was really really tough and I just yeah it took me a long while to get my vibe with it all and to work out how to like work with people in that way and one of the things I look back on is I think I think it's much better at university these days but in those days I didn't really ever do too much team stuff and so I hadn't really ever been creative in a team dynamic and so for me and that's become like a really big thing for me 20 whatever years later now 24 years later of I really focused on team dynamic because I really remember through my own experience I'd never really been exposed to it and I and I it just took a while to really get my head around how to do that in that way.

17:35Yeah. I wonder if it's still the same at, I mean, I feel like it is still the same at universities now that -

17:40James Greenfield:I think they do more team stuff. Do they do more team stuff? Yeah, more partnership stuff. It is interesting, isn't it? Because working in a team, I think I always used to have the point of view that you should be good at everything. So you can work in a team, but you should be able to do everyone's job in that team, which I don't think really is true. I think if you get people that have got very good skills and they all come together in different areas, then that's producing magical stuff. I think one of the things that a lot of people beat themselves up about which I know I definitely beat myself up about is this idea of like your weaknesses and like what you can't do yeah and I think I'm a great believer the complete designer doesn't exist and I think yes and so what you'll get is you know I've had some bosses who you know I'm an more of an ideas focused person big vision or whatever and if you yeah I remember at one point just doing an annual report and it was like 400 pages I'm dyslexic and they expected me to go through it and this is kind of pre spell checks were there but they weren't great yeah to go through it and pick up all this and I remember it being given back to me and being like there's still 24 spelling mistakes in here and it's like yeah I can't spell yeah yeah if you want the spelling done get a bloody copyright I am not the person to spell check but like you know yes that kind of like really detailed attention to detail grid-based design was never ever and I used to beat myself up about it and would try and would do extra work on it and would like read extra stuff and do training and all this kind of stuff to try and get good at it.

19:04James Greenfield:I look back on it now and I think maybe it's a bit of a waste of time. In the same way, I taught myself a lot of software over the years and I just don't think I'm naturally the best person at learning code-based stuff. So I taught myself to code at one point and we'd always struggle with the bug testing and stuff like that. And now I'm like, you probably just should have known that you're just not the person to do that kind of stuff, you know? I think it would be really good advice earlier on in your career to just really focus on what you're really really good at and understand that other people will feel like there's a balance i think you should focus on what you're good at but i think you should be aware of your position within others and so therefore i'm a brave believer which is like yes you might have strengths and there might be an area but are they complementary to everyone else's skills i guess what i'm saying is don't beat yourself up about your weaknesses yeah you'll have weaknesses completely and you know it is good to work on them and you come you know so for example if you're heavily introverted i think being able to work on your ability to communicate your work yes is massively vital otherwise you'll hit the ceiling and you'll never be able to go past it yeah if you can't explain your ideas to people then yeah um and and then and you know and if you're not technically minded i appreciate stuff like software is hard to learn but you still need to learn to do it because you need to bring your ideas to life in a way yeah kind of work but what i don't think is i think i've seen loads of people that I've managed across the years who chastise themselves about their weaknesses yeah don't beat yourself up just acknowledge it and work on the bits that you can basically yeah definitely yeah very good advice so you moved to your first job yeah so so Harriman's there I worked there uh and then at Christmas that the the first year so I got when I went there in September they were like yeah we're done and I remember being a bit like oh god what am I going to do next and I hadn't really thought another step ahead yeah uh and so i read in a cd-rom uh put the new work that i put on it and started like sending out stuff to various people and it was really hard and basically the dot-com bubble had burst of course yeah and which is what had sunk deep end and it just meant that there was this contraction that was happening and you know as a 21 year old 20 year old i didn't really know about recessions i didn't really know what i what the dot-com bubble was if i'm really honest i wasn't really up on tech stuff yeah me too and and so it was hard and i really and you know and i had these certain studios in my head that i convinced myself that i would work at yeah and i wasn't hearing back from any of those studios who are your top studios you want to do back in those days i remember i really liked to see uh north was always one that i really admired of course spin i think were pretty big at that time yeah i think they were actually like physically big as well there's a lot of people right okay um and and you know and i also had talked to kind of i remember i think i remember emailing identica and you know some of the bigger kind of like consultancies and those days so to be honest i didn't really know that much about brand as much that kind of came in late later time it's harder to research the industry in those days isn't it i didn't realize it was a i didn't i couldn't see it as a whole thing at that point i think I think it's helped a lot in that.

22:09James Greenfield:Graphics International, which became graphic and stuff like that. It was literally how you would find out about who these studios were. Yeah. I remember that Graphics International, when I was at university, did a Rock Family Trees, but with Design Family Trees edition, which it showed all the studios and what studios they come from. Oh, wow. The fact that North was from Cartlidge Levine and all this kind of stuff. And I remember that was a really amazing piece of research for me because I was like, I had no idea that all these studios had been born from other studios. Yeah, what comes from all that?

22:40James Greenfield:No one ever explains that to you. Yeah. And so I remember that was an issue that I held on to for many years and used that as like a research tool to kind of like navigate. So yeah, I ended up working in a company that doesn't exist anymore called One. And it was good in a way because it was less pressure. And I did some very random stuff. And it was a very random company. but I ended up uh like the most random thing I did is ended up uh working on Masonic Quarterly which is when the Masons decided to open themselves up and uh we had to basically create a GQ for Masons. GQ for Masons what a brief.

23:16James Greenfield:Which is called MQ and it was a bizarre bizarre experience. I can imagine. But it was kind of great because I'm like you know and I've never really done magazine design before so I learned about magazines and then I did lots of other random stuff at that company and did you find out about the world of the masons yeah i have many masonic stories that won't be on a podcast um i'll ask later yeah uh and did and did that and you know in a way at that time was also freelancing and was doing stuff for artists in the background and did like an artist magazine and would do stuff for shows uh for people to be able to like publicize their shows and there was like a little kind of group of artists who i work with quite uh heavily and that was a kind of good self-motivating thing and then I worked with a fashion brand and did t-shirts for them and lots of other stuff and so in a way I was kind of the beginning of actually client management and self-management and all that kind of stuff and I was actually really enjoyed all that stuff and so even as like a 22 23 year old was doing a lot of juggling a lot of stuff as well as a full-time job yeah okay just trying to like make my way in the world a bit really yeah yeah i think that sort of juggling things i think it's what people are doing today anyway isn't it but it's important mix but gotten skill to be able to have it was less less of a thing back then yeah it was less of a thing back then side hustles weren't really um talked about so what was what was the next your next role what was the sort of so then i went to work at office shoes yeah of course which is which was a really funny it's basically a company called represent is a really well-known recruiter in london yeah uh micah represent i was the first person he ever placed really yeah uh um I've worked with him ever since yeah quite a nice story for me that and uh he had a position at office and it wasn't and at the time I was like I'm just not getting to these studios I really want to get to but I was also a massive trainer head and the kind of carrot dangle was offspring trainer store I needed a refresh and I was like well if I go there I get to do that that's a cool thing for my portfolio yeah and someone had told me what the trainer discount was and how it worked as well.

25:24James Greenfield:That's very good. And so therefore I just took it. And also at that point I was on 12 grand a year and the office job off the top of my head, I seem to remember, was 23 grand a year. Wow, that's quite a jump. And so it was like you just couldn't say no to it. Plus cheap trainers. Yeah. I would have been there. Yeah. Well, the thing that was really tricky about the trainers was you would order them, they would take the money out of your salary and the trainers would turn up on your desk. And so it was far too easy. Oh, definitely. And so at one point I ended up with 80 pairs of trainers. I really couldn't afford.

25:57Yeah, I can see myself. I've got a bit of a trainer addiction anyway.

26:00James Greenfield:So yeah, the big salary, which isn't that big in the grand scheme of things, and the trainer discount ended up being quite tricky. Yeah, I can imagine. But so what was it like on the in-house side? Is that your only in-house role? Yeah, it's my only in-house role. It was good. I was in a room full of 20-year-olds in a really interesting industry in shoe wear. I'd always get into fashion. They were lovely people to work with. It was funny. I was saying to someone the other day, I look back on it now, and it's absolutely bizarre that this happened. But we would go to the pub on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday lunchtime without fail every week.

26:34James Greenfield:Yeah. And everyone would have two or three drinks and then go back to work for two or three hours maybe and then go back to the pub. Yeah, it sounds familiar. And so it was social. It was fun. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? I made really good friends there. We had a really good time. and I had a great boss, Richard, who was a maverick, but was really interesting. And, you know, I do crazy stuff like Christmas cards and I do brand loads and do all the look books and do lots of different stuff. And the only problem I had was I didn't have a creative director. And so at this point I was, you know, I'd never really had a good creative director.

27:09James Greenfield:And so a bit of me was very undeveloped, which was I had all these ideas and I had lots of technical capability and I had lots of stuff that I could do but I never worked apart from my internship for creative leadership that I respected. That's a good point. So what do you get from that creative leadership? What difference does it make? To put that down, to focus on this. You're obsessed with that idea, but it's not a good idea, but it's a one side. That's actually the thing that you should go after. And actually, if you just did this, this and this, you would actually... And so what it meant was when I went into my next role where I worked at a company called BB Saunders, which was a spin shoot off.

27:49James Greenfield:And so two of the senior people from spin had left and started their own agency. Was that a bit of me was insanely undeveloped because I was probably a middleweight designer. And in some ways, a senior designer in terms of my client handling capabilities, because I'd done all this work at office where I was having to present it to the leadership office. But I was like 24 year old. Yeah. You know, very wet behind the ears. and so there was some bits of me that were really evolved probably much further evolved because i had to be yeah and other bits of me were massively under under evolved and so therefore that was a really interesting job and i loved that job and it's a great job and i worked with really good people but i remember my senior designer there being quite frustrated about how i couldn't do certain things and he was like why can't you do this just don't understand why you can't do this yeah okay no one's ever shown me yeah what do you mean you know everyone's ever shown you you're like you know been in the industry for like three four years and i was like yeah but no one's ever shown me how to do this because you know this is my history yeah so it was a real crash course for me at first I had to really really try and learn certain things wow was it exciting or did it make you panic a bit or both a bit of both yeah and I and you know it was also really interesting because the pace there was much faster than anywhere else I'd worked I worked with some amazingly capable people who've all gone on to do really good things and so therefore it was insanely intimidating I was no longer the best person in the room yeah yeah and if anything I was the worst person in the room she's kind of what you need but also makes you feel a bit rubbish yeah yes totally confident person and it was it was just different and it was you know the only way I can ever think about it from a sport analogy is that I've been playing kind of non-league football or league two football and I've been doing really well and then I'd signed for a premier league club and I just couldn't believe how good everyone was around me.

29:39James Greenfield:And so it was just really intimidating. Yeah. But I also finally had a good creative director and that was like revelatory to me. Yeah. And I just remember. I also had a designer I worked with there, a guy called Hamish McGill. He'd gone on to have his own studio and done... Yeah, I know Hamish. ...and done in Lewis and South Coast. He's the best designer I've ever worked with. and he could just take, I remember we were doing this Nike thing and he was like, yeah, it's okay, but why don't you do this, this and this? And I just remember being like, oh my God, I cannot believe in an hour where he's done that.

30:15James Greenfield:And so that to me was really inspirational as well, which was it really helped me see the way that people could just take things and just add of something or do something or make something. And so it kind of reset a lot of stuff for me and it really helped me evolve in a long way but it was also like a growing up place as well I remember I think it's my first annual review Martin who I still work with now who was my boss then um said uh said to me you know it's infuriating you're late all the time and I remember being like what and he's like we're 10 minutes late or you walk in at 10 o 'clock or whatever and it really made me realize that my models were wrong and basically my first internship they were late all the time and my company I worked at no one was ever there at 10 a.m so I just would walk in at 10 a.m and then when I was up it worked in the fashion place where everyone was always hung over everyone always slept in a 10 30 and then so I had just completely unconsciously assumed that's what you did and then just copied everyone else suddenly here was a company that took all of the things which I now subsequently take really seriously yeah seriously and it had been someone pointing out to me age 25 that actually you need to pull your head out your ass and go and so I was never late again and wow that's and and that good advice is the kind of thing that I look back on that bit of my career as like yes I got better at being a designer and yes I got better at workflow and god I learned so much about working with clients and I learned so much about how to build an amazing presentation and how to like think about narrative and all that stuff but I also learned some absolute basics of how to work in a team how to be on time respect for others you know yeah it's that respect for others isn't it that you can piss people off without realizing it 100 % it looks like you're not serious bosses who really were inspirational people who showed me how to do things the right way yeah it was it was that was a transformation but yeah definitely so then was it man versus machine no then I went to a company called proud uh and that's kind of a great financial crash hit and that was obviously a really tough time and I can remember really vividly that everyone else got to let go apart from me which was a really really difficult period god definitely 2008 yeah and you know everything we were working with ubs obviously they are suddenly in a difficult time like with nike they cancel the projects you know we had really good top tier clients but it all just went quiet yeah and we just had to kind of maintain the bits that we had and you know you you had one day and my boss has dealt with it brilliantly and it I look back on it and I think they did a really good job in very difficult circumstances.

32:50James Greenfield:But when one day where you had this office with kind of six, eight people sat around and the next day there's three of you. And I remember that being a really like, wow. Yeah. But for me, it was difficult because I didn't know what was going to happen with a company. And Proud was a company that I knew. I knew Dan a little bit. And because they were friends, you know, studios knew each other and they were doing well and they were looking for someone. And I remember it was this kind of moment where I was like, right, I've done four and a half years here. it's the longest I've worked in the moment I've worked you know I owe that company so much but I was coming to that bit of my career where I was ready to be a leader and so I went I went right there and that was a really good place to work and I did so this is a man versus yeah and that's where I first started to really get into tv which I did for quite a while so we did bt vision just on s4c when I joined we did sci-fi a lot of other big channel stuff so big channel identities and all that kind of thing that must have been a lot of fun 3d emotion which I hadn't really being exposed to too much and so that came in and a bit more did a bit of digital and proud i invented pinterest before pinterest exists which always really annoys me so basically created this project for getty images which was a pin board where you could save images and you could group them and you could put them it's basically pinterest way before pinterest exists and getty had it and made it and we did it online and we i remember we went to a show at texas and we had it on big screens there and all these creatives were using it and everything oh wow but they never invested it and never did anything with it and it's like i'm always like that's that's another someone might have seen it and yeah door moment totally um and so that was a really interesting turn because i and i went into that company as and you know whereas at bb saunders i'd always been a younger member of the team and so therefore i was always perceived that way yeah it's my chance to reinvent myself so you're a head of design and so this time i was just a senior designer but what's your way up to head of design and then i went to head of design was um mad best machine which was my next job right actually my next job was airside which i was only out there for nine months oh okay and that was i was first creative director job and uh i was reasonably young creative director and i met my business partner caroline there that's an amazing experience yeah and airside but airside at that time was a company that had been very very successful kind of five ten years previously and i think the founders were having a bit of a interesting time to understand what they wanted to do next and they brought myself and Caroline in to kind of like drive that next phase right it just wasn't for me it just wasn't the right place to be I felt like the team spirit was missing massively which was a real shame for me because they made a great product but everyone was individuals and they didn't really work together very well there was it was quite a political place and I realized that a proud and at B.B.

35:34James Greenfield:Saunders where I'd spent at that point like six years before. It was a team place and people were all with each other. And I really missed that culture. But all of this was me thinking about the seeds for what COTA would be in the future. So did you always know? At that point, I knew I wanted my own agency. You wanted your own agency. And so from Proud onwards, I was in research, mate. So thinking what can I pick up? What will I adopt? What will I not do? And so when I left Ayrside to go to Manverse Machine, and one of the things I did there was I felt like I had unresolved stuff at Proud in terms of TV stuff and we'd worked with Man vs Machine at Proud and at that point Man vs Machine were fully motion and did all 3D stuff and they were like we want to do more brand stuff and so I went over there and I was really lucky to do some amazing Channel 4 stuff so yeah they do amazing work and 4.7 and did a what big project for Google called Google Fiber and I worked on EE and we We did loads of amazing stuff and it's a brilliant place to work.

36:31James Greenfield:And I wasn't going to leave there and I was having a great time. But then I got headhunted to Design Studio. And they set out a really interesting premise for me in terms of the fact that they really wanted to go after being one of the leading brand studios. And that's where I really wanted to be. And at that point, at some point in that journey, I'd really woken up to the fact that actually brand was my thing. Yeah. Because I thought as a graphic designer, but actually brand was where. Creating actual. Yeah. Lied. and so that was an opportunity that I just took and so I went there and was creative director and then executive creative director um so yeah jumped around a fair amount but a bit picked up the right things at the right point it was all very conscious yeah trying to work out all the models and had realized in my time at bb saunders that actually the models are really really important you need to understand how to do the various aspects of what you're trying to achieve and so massively you know and then that kind of maturity I got in my late 20s had also really started me helped me join the dots a bit more whereas I guess I was just a bit more naive and a bit like bumbling around in my early 20s like yeah kind of like less conscious about hitting into things and kind of things happening versus late 20s early 30s where I was much more like if I do that then this could happen and yes yeah definitely yeah that's it strategic career lines and sort of building towards that yeah I think it's really important so tell me about Koto because that's I mean such a amazing I mean the work you guys are putting out is just it's so impressive it's really really good stuff but so tell me so it started out with three of you yeah so basically kind of at Design Shia we'd done Airbnb which was obviously an amazing piece of work and had started to get some of the other attention off the back of van so some really interesting work was coming through but my dad had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and i wanted him to know that i was going to start the business before he went and so there was a real forcing mechanism for me there which was like actually this is this is the thing that's going to push it right now you're going to yeah and it's also like in the most obvious way ever the life is short moment and so you're like yes you know and you can be prepared but you can also keep on hiding in the idea that you've got a good job and you're preparing and you're thinking about it and one day i'll do my own offer studio and actually you know what this was the moment so I struck out left the comfortable ECD salary and all the things that come with that hard to do very hard to do specifically in your mid-30s and yeah we hired a well we borrowed a corner of Mr Bingo's studio which was oh really in uh Dalston and was had he forgot to tell me it had really bad heating and really bad internet that heating i can kind of deal with yeah internet was appalling oh god and so if you wanted to do like loads of imagery search you had to go home to like google search and save it all which was literally this is unsustainable but the plan there was and so carolina who i'd worked with at airside and joey who i'd worked with at design studio ah so that's how you met joey brilliant okay and joey now runs the la studio and brought the three together and that's that was our kind of starting Genesis.

39:40I see. Okay. So that's, how did you, how did you build it? How did you get your first clients? What's the...

39:46James Greenfield:Well, I think the thing is, you know, the starting premise was, and I've probably said this to loads of people before in the past, and I'm probably boring anyone listening, was I felt like in my experience I'd had was that there was booted agencies which did craft beautifully and made things amazing. And, you know, you'd look at the website they've made or you looked at the design they've made or whatever. And that was my background. And I was really used to that but and the kind of second half of my career at that point I kind of been more and more into brand and I felt there was very few people who could do the big thinking and the big ideas and take clients on that journey and transformation all those things need to happen but do it in a way where they've still respected the craft and they've delivered everything to like the detail everything feels amazing um and so I felt like that our our approach would be that we would try and close that chasm and we would do that now there are other people doing it but it was there were few and far between but then that's all well and good to come out with your big plan but you know the first six months was pure hustle and it's literally yeah email and call everybody you have ever worked with met known ask them what they can do definitely keep doing it keep on it make sure you push it i remember when we first started i had a job for getty images and that was my kind of launch thing and we did that for a week or two and then getty uh rang up and said I'm really sorry we're having a really hard time at the moment we're going to pull this project and see the only work I had was gone and they'd run up on a Friday to tell us that and I remember Joey and I because at this point Caroline was still working out of her old job right Joey and I went to the pub in Dalston and for the first few years that was the only time we ever finished early and I always look back on that and I always thought we'd probably just you know take half Friday off or whatever yeah we did and in fact we did the absolute opposite and then you know things started to fall that were quite lucky i remember the stupid stuff like we got a really interesting project in and i realized it was a for a fur company and so i had to say no to it you can't work for a fur company of course yeah so you're like no but then other things started happening so there's this company in new zealand which is quite a small company they love the airbnb brand they've done their research worked out who had been involved in it found us oh wow and so we did the brand for their consultancy and they spent quite like a bit of money on it i look back on it now i'm like that's quite amazing we did a media company very simple piece of work did their identity did a website we did some stuff for this body warm camera company it was just like lots of stuff and you know we're talking like three four five grand we did the identity for a company called super high they're still using the logo now 10 years really brilliant which i'm loving yeah um which was one of our early first clients but then one of the things that really really lucky happened which was i was quite noisy on Twitter in those days and somebody had been tasked at Coca-Cola to put together some interesting studios that might be interested in doing some of the smaller bits of work that they've got yeah someone had been on Twitter and seen me talking that day and I've gone oh I had that studio as well and we didn't have a website didn't have any of it we had like a you didn't have a website wow we had a holding page but not work so yeah I thought you go with a mystery rather so they put us forward then coca-cola had this project which was these emojis and they had briefed a few other people to do it and no one had been able to land it and they were like got two weeks and i seem to remember off the top of my head i might be getting this wrong 10 grand to do this work now for us at that time that was a lot of money yeah and we were like of course we had lots of other stuff on because we're doing bits and everything but we were like and so we got one of our friends in to help us as like a freelancer so we'd started spending money which was kind of scary because it was our savings but you know it's what it is yeah and we did this emoji thing and we nailed it which you know could have not could have did but we did yeah and they were like oh wow you guys are really good and we then got asked to pitch on the Fanta rebrand which right and so that's like the real and I can still remember and at that point we had also one rebrand of Gumtree and so wow okay and so things had started to happen that sort of yeah and we started to get momentum and we were in at this point we're in a co-working space in uh southeast London yeah we had this one room and I had so Bingo would come with us because I was like they come with us we get decent into that get some heat you can't sit in here anymore and another friend of ours Darren who had like a publishing company was in with us and so we had this kind of co-working space nice if you wanted a meeting it was in the room with everyone else listening so you couldn't really have a meeting it just is what it was we played a lot of ping pong in those days anyway and and these things and things started to fall and we just took these opportunities and you know winning gumtree winning and then fans did the pitch and then we won the pitch i remember going to a talk oh god years ago probably like 10 years ago or maybe it was early as of um kate wasn't it and you were talking about the fanta it was a glug talk yeah yeah that's kind of like nine years it was like nine years ago yeah okay you're talking about the fantasy brands wasn't it it was like cut out of paper type yeah yeah yeah completely it's really really good and and so that and then once you've got that then you can open doors with that and so it's all about trying and i knew like my thing i always thought then which i think actually much more now is really really important is that if you're starting an agency the clients you get in the first 18 months will define that agency forever that's interesting yeah and i think too many people I have met along the way who've maybe done five years and then gone right we're gonna get big clients now and it's like yeah it's not gonna happen because you didn't get big clients in the first five years yeah 18 to 24 months you have to get to the scale of client that you if to benchmark it that's that's where that's who we are looking for yes and it's very hard to break out of that and you know it's easy for me to say that but that that is my yeah and so therefore I knew that you know at this point we'd also then started working with Hilton and And so we had logos that we could put on a piece because there's only so many people that are going to trust the complete startup.

45:45James Greenfield:And so, yeah, it was. And so one of our values, we wrote our values very early on, but one of our values is relentless hustle. And I know that hustle can be seen to be a negative thing, et cetera. Coco only exists because of relentless hustle. We just grew up. We were tenacity. We were like, we want to do this. We want it to be successful. and so therefore we know that we have to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations every day you know bugging people going to network totally whatever it is but you also need to be excellent at your job and your craft and your work and that kind of stuff but say that's a given that's my secondary that's what will set you apart from all the other people who are excellent at that kind of stuff and then what i found in that first year was that we needed more people because i was out doing stuff and talking to people and like building decks and building narratives and doing all this of stuff and so therefore you're then suddenly responsible for looking after all those people yeah so you know it's like someone goes to you there's no milk left and you're like it's my job I've got to go and get the milk or you know and it's like is it is this studio actually good enough for us and I remember that I had a moment we've been to do a presentation in London for a company we were rebranding and I came back into the studio and there's like 16 people and then it was really hot and I was like I owe these people a new studio this is not an acceptable place for them to work yeah it struck me coming back in and so suddenly this responsibility like hit me in a big way yeah for the first three or four years of koto it was all about i have to make this real all the people are invested now definitely people here we owe them you know jobs etc so of course i've got to do it and and so that that's and and that in a way almost gives you another level of hustle because it's not like you can kind of go like oh you know I can go and do something else it's like yeah so it's all them as well and totally it's all the stuff I've learned about team and everything came flooding back and in a way I think the whole 10 years of Koto much of it has been stuff that I hated as much as liked agencies replicated so yeah I missed it out when we went through my career history I worked at an agency called Cuba for a while for a very very obnoxious man who refused to speak to anybody before midday every day oh my god that's something out of a comedy show and then at midday would kind of walk up at your desk and berate you about why something was wrong or whatever and i'm like they're they're always the things that rattle in the back of my head when i yeah what i want cota to be like is it's like i don't want it to ever be anything like that yeah i got the same at red setter there's so many things that i have taken and copied and that kind of stuff from other people that i've worked with but there's so much that i've thought i'm never going to do that and we are never going to be that and it's yeah it's important it's really important definitely so when did you first sort of feel like you had your first proper sort of right we've got the studio we've got this it was it the 16 people moving into a place um i kind of see it in three chapters so the first chapter i think is that kind of desperation to make it real and then one day you just have to be a bit like you know what the phone keeps on ringing we've got good work people want to work here yeah a lovely settled team yeah we have a nice time every week's interesting like it was tiring at the beginning it's never not been tiring because i've been flying around the world constantly but yeah and you know so there were moments when i was somewhere else and i remember poor old caroline who has coo now but then those days as md i'd be like can you just give this person some creative direction she's like no i've never given creative direction before in my life what on earth are you talking about but like loads of those moments yeah you know but you're just trying to hold it together yeah you're in all these different areas and so the first chapter is like making it real and then one day you have to let yourself know that you made it real the second chapter is about internationalizing it yeah when i said what studio was first so we launched la and berlin on the same day officially did you wow la was a little bit ahead and so berlin was because tim who'd worked with me for many years wanted to move with his wife to Germany right and I was like okay let's just set up a studio around you yeah and we were going to California loads for Airbnb and all of our other clients there and so therefore one old Joey or I had to move to California and so and then when I was a design studio we had a San Francisco office and a London office in those days and they were two different companies you just there was the name above the door was the same yeah i hear that a lot but nothing else was saying about it yeah and i always used to think it was really weird and we had another challenge was the san francisco wants to put stuff on the website and you'd be like that's not very good and it just was like i was like but why is it not very good like why are we allowing yeah why did it not come all through and so we set a rule very early on at kota with the internationalization which was we were never going to get a like for like studio we were never going to create the same environment.

50:38James Greenfield:The people that started the new studios had to go back to the place in Dalston with the dusty floor. Really? The internet and the cold eating. Not quite. We allowed them to have good eating and good internet. Yeah, okay. But it had to be like a WeWork co-working. Interesting. Because you have to earn that right to the studio. And you know, Koto Sydney at the moment is in quite a cramped co-working space. wow i didn't know that interesting because anyway it's a lovely building honestly it's a co-working now is a bit different isn't it it isn't you know it isn't it isn't the same and it's and it's because that's the journey that each studio needs to go on yeah but also we really wanted to make sure that we spent loads and loads of effort and time on making sure that the companies feel the same and so i'm lucky enough to fly to all our studios every year and i went out for dinner in sydney back end of 2024 and i sat around this table really nice evening with all the team there and i was like these people could be taken out and put in any other studios yeah tomorrow it would work in the same way that it works that's really interesting and so therefore that even back then when we were internationalizing was so important to us which was we cannot have an us and them culture these things places have to feel like yeah one team one mentality and that work's never done that yeah always think i've been to your studio in there and it felt like koto so it's that's just the doors open there's like 25 dogs running around yeah completely a lot of 24 dollar uh green smoothies from ero one or whatever yeah absolutely i'm like how much did that smoothie cost it's insane 20 dollars what uh my absolute britishness comes in yeah me too yeah i've never quite brought myself to actually do it yeah and and and so this and the second chapter is that obviously we had covid as well which was yeah interesting time for us absolutely uh as an in-person company that's very social and very people orientated being locked in your spare rooms is not oh my god yeah and so we had to kind of work our way through that which was really challenging but then the third phase has all been been about scale which is how do you achieve the things that got you where you've got to yeah at scale don't lose product quality keep momentum keep the culture people first environment you know our mission is make space for creativity we have to make sure that the spaces where people work feel creative they have the right tools they have the right training they have the right mindset they have the right colleagues yeah they have the right projects in front of them everything is going to set up that they're going to feel like they come into work that day yeah and they can be as creative as they can be in their life yeah and you know we can demonstrate that in all the various ways that we do so and you're doing big stuff now it's like you're doing we do a lot of stuff as well still and it's important to keep that mix i think yeah i agree i imagine the team really loves that and you still get extra creativity but yeah i think doing rebrand to people like amazon so yeah it's bad it's all right isn't it i can't still can't get my head around it i was in new york a couple months ago now and this gray van drove past and i was like yeah that's the van that was in the mock-up and it's there it is real driving through brooklyn wow that's a yeah you just that's kind of like it's as big as it gets that one definitely so can i ask you a final question about tips for young people starting out today what aside from design skills which i think just having the best design skills is a given how can they stand out i know you've talked about a bit already but i think the interesting thing is like design is not just designers and i think that's the thing that people get very wrong yes i think they think there's just like 10 identikit designers in a room all in their big glasses with their black clothes on being totally being designery and actually it's a much broader thing than that you know and i think if i walk around our studio or many other studios there's loads of people with graphic design degrees who are doing client service work yes there are people that start off as graphic designers who've actually become motion because they realize that making things move is their passion yeah there are people that did English at university, you actually realised that doing a verbal identity and brand writing is like the most amazing thing.

54:51James Greenfield:And so I think we have this idea because it's easy to explain that you can be a lawyer, you can be an accountant, you can be a designer, whatever. Actually, the creative industry is full of a myriad of different people in many different ways. And so I think trying to remember that and engage in that, if someone's like in their late teens, there is a place for you there you just need to understand which bit of it and the way to do that is get yourself involved and get you know and then I think if someone's in their early 20s and kind of at the beginning of their career within the creative industries don't stay where you are if it's not satisfying you in like enough of a way because there will be somewhere out there that has more of what you're looking for and it isn't always just going to be about the works quite often it's about the people yeah quite often about it's where you are quite often it's about the clients and I think trying to experience all those things you know I think there's an amazing thing that's happened in the 20 whatever years I've been the 24 years that I've been in the industry is there's actually loads of really good in-house jobs now and you know that's a massive change brands take creative really seriously yeah in a way they never did previously and so there's actually some amazing internal teams out there doing really really great work as well which just wasn't a thing yeah we started out with some internal teams at red setter are amazing that i wouldn't have known the creativity was there 15 years ago 100 so so yeah i think search find your place find your space there's something for everybody is my thing that sounds like very good advice james thank you so much for coming on the podcast i've really enjoyed it

56:34Thank you.