Lisa Smith - D&AD President and Global Chief Design Officer at Uncommon Creative Studio

0:08Welcome to My Life in Design, brought to you by the DBA and design-focused PR agency Red Setter. I'm Claire Blyth, 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.

0:31This week I'm recording live from D &AD HQ in Shoreditch with the rather fantastic Lisa Smith. Lisa's now Global Chief Design Officer at Uncommon. She was previously Global Executive Creative Director at JKR. Before that, ECD of US food company Chobani and Head of Design at Wolf Olin's. She's been recognised by Fast Company as one of the most creative people. She's won a gold at Cannes Lions for Burger King, Brand Impact Award for The Met. She's won a Fast Company Innovation by Design Award for a rebrand of USA Today. And she's also the new D &AD president. Very good. On Thursday. Yeah, from Thursday.

1:16She's played a pivotal role in global rebrands for clients such as Walmart, Burger King, Mozilla, Paramount, Uber, Impossible Foods. Fanta and The Met. Lisa, welcome to the podcast. Hi, it's really nice to be here live. Thank you so much. So should we start right at the beginning of how did you realise design was a thing you could base a career around? What age were you? When did it start? I think people always love to talk about that it's something that they discovered when they were young and they were amazing at drawing and all of these things. I didn't really realise what I wanted to do and anything to do with design really until I think I was like 19 when I really when I did a foundation art course I was all about sports really so what led you there what what's the background yeah well there's there's a few kind of you know as I grew up my mum was one of those mums that took me and my brothers to all different activities so we were always doing something playing something I have two brothers I'm about to say real brothers but that's because I have a half brother and a stepbrother I have a lot of brothers and um and so yeah we were always playing outside always doing things I was running I did cross country I I played field hockey for east of England I swam my dad was obsessed with us swimming because um his his father had drowned so he was very much like we all have to learn to swim so we were always sort of encouraged and I think also it gave my mom Saturday mornings back when she'd drop us off at a leisure center and and be like look after your brother see you later I'm gonna go get my hair done so that was kind of like more the younger the sports carried on and then as I sort of got kind of older the school school I just didn't love I wasn't very good at it I'm to be honest I'm just not that academic I mean or I know people like talk about oh my god you understand strategy and all of these different things I was much more street smart than school smart like definitely like to party not to be in the school classroom if I could bunk off like I think my mum had to come to the school once and they said she hasn't been there for over half of the year I'd have a boyfriend pick me up after I got dropped off I'd be like off we go um so I was like yes and surprisingly I got through my GCSEs I should never have stayed to do A-levels and I think we don't talk enough about like whether we should go to college whether we should do recreational classes or whether we should carry on and do a levels you just did it because you were like expected to do it and I was just like and then of course I thought just like my GCSEs I could do my biology a level and study the whole syllabus the night before and of course I failed and got ungraded so I was just like doesn't work like that yeah um and as I still got accepted to university with pretty poor grades to go and do sports at like bedford university i had this realization that i was just like do i really want to be what i thought i was going to be which was going to be a school teacher and i'll get up on a saturday mornings and i'll teach field hockey in the pissing down rain in england and i was like i don't want to do that i want to make stuff i think so then i contacted cambridge regional college which was a local college and kind of confessed that i had really like funked out of school flunked out of school and um and they were like well we can't accept you onto the art foundation unless you can prove you you can draw so I spent the whole summer drawing my boyfriend's car engine like photographically drawing it so you didn't have a portfolio or anything this is no and I took this drawing to the class and they were like cool you can draw a little loan did they know it took me like weeks and weeks to to draw this and then I went and did an art foundation and I think it was really just like it was just much more I wanted to explore and this course blew my mind like if I could ever recommend anyone doing an art foundation course where you can do textiles and fashion and jewelry making and photography and graphic design and and paint with your foot and your arm and your left elbow and all of these different things I was like this is so cool the perfect age to do that I'm so jealous I didn't do it I wish yeah it was just it opened my mind completely and then you get towards a third term because it's only a year class and they're like you need to apply for university you need to pick what you want to specialize in and I was just like oh I don't I don't know I think I want to specialize in fine art and my mum was like you will never get a job I was like and she said you have to leave home and I was like don't worry I don't want to live with you either I love you but I don't want to be here either and she was just like you should pick some something that you feel like you could progress and I was like well it's interesting this is this class called graphic design and I was doing collages and the lady who was my teacher doing that class at Cambridge Regional her husband made a film called Cabbage and was like an amazing film director and I was like wow and she was like you can do all of the things you love doing through this thing called graphic design like you can do photography you can do illustration you can do like patterns and textiles and everything graphic design is the place that will sort of encompass everything and I was like that is what I'm going to apply to do at college but so where did you go what did you do I went to Baspar University College which was I was one I was very lucky I was one of the last years that ever lived in a crescent the crescent behind the royal crescent which was the halls of residence where you could run up and down across a whole crescent across three floors with fine artists ceramicists some kind of like theatrical acting I think was there and graphic design that was the only four courses and it was again it was like doing the art foundation it was mind-blowing for the like the level of creativity and everyone mixing and experimenting but in truth I didn't really want to go to college so I had a whole wobble in the first term and I wanted to leave and I came home I think um I just I just I wish again I didn't have to follow in hindsight a formal more education thing i was like really excited to leave home but then really anxious when i finally had done it we were about to go on a trip to new york i was i there's a longer story to this but the short version is that i was born in new york i haven't been back there and i was really excited but also very anxious about it i was honestly i was suffering from sort of like panic attacks at the time and and things and I just found college just so stressful so at the end of the first term I wanted to drop out and I came home and sort of went to bed and went to bed for about a month and my mom was like you really wanted to do this Lisa please get up out of bed and go back to college and I will tell you she literally dragged me with my stepdad and they drove my little Citroen AX behind my car because I didn't have it and literally took me to the college gave me a number for a psychiatrist that was at the local doctors who helped me sort of regain my panic attacks over like just learning to breathe and we went through a whole process and it was amazing and I was very lucky and yeah then the rest of the sort of next two and a half years I threw myself into it and I I mainly did photography as my degree it was like 64 the graphic design and 40 photography but I loved it I loved like work like Martin Parr and I wanted to be in the studio and shooting medium format and made weird and wonderful projects I just put a teeny bit of type on in the corner because we didn't I couldn't even afford an Apple Mac back then and we had to share them amongst the whole class so we didn't come out of college computer literate there was a a few kids that did that obviously came from slightly wealthier families and they all ended up doesn't it but yeah I mean it was crazy that was in 2000 so it's not even that was sort of the last era before everybody I think amazing parents though actually listening to you and getting you support and yeah I mean my mum well again I think she's always taught me to fight for what you want and try and get out of the the the funks and we all go through these different things I've got a lot of like time and patience for people that have suffered any kind of depression or anxiety I have mine very early on so I've got to kind of know when I see the signs later in my my life and my career and I'm kind of pleased that I went through it at that point but it's scary when you're in that situation and you're putting yourself out there but you don't really You want to put yourself out there and you're battling with your ambition, but you want to retreat.

10:23It's just all of these like frictions and duality. But yeah, I got through college. I loved it. I lived with five guys who were all fine artists who would tell me that when I came home and they were watching a porn DVD that they found it in the garden. I was like, really? That sounds like a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. so what then what was the did you know what you wanted to do did you have agencies in mind that would just see what was out there well I mean I did a little bit in terms of like it was it was 2000 so there was a massive recession happening again I know every generation we all get to experience like leaving colleges or some point in your career where you might the circumstances are out of your control because what's happening in the industry in the world um so I I left at a point when it was really kind of like really hard to get a job the first place I went to was mother and I'm not afraid to tell you I knocked on their door went in talked to a reception she's like you need to go away and find a writer and I was like where the hell do you get one of those I don't know like I wasn't used to sort of the the London colleges which were just a bit more like buttoned up around obviously specializing in in what would be advertising and traditional sort of this this art director writing pair I was like totally perplexed by like that and I was like okay I don't I don't I don't know what to do that so I wrote hundreds of letters and eventually I ended up getting um some work experience at an annual report company called Radley Elder I still know those guys very well today quite a few of them it turned out they were one of the guys that worked there his mum taught me art of primary school I didn't know that until I was was there and they brought me in to to help we I was like making Christmas cards for banks like Klein Warton Benson that would turn into three kings or something cheesy like that but it was like but but Rich Rob Rich at his name he pulled me a sign and said I'd love to see your portfolio I'm not sure if you're the right fit for this place in truth and I was like I'm not sure I also want to work with 50 men and be the only woman on the on the floor either like this reporting at the time oh my goodness and like it was representative and mirroring what was happening in the industry it's like the ladies with the account people or typesetting downstairs and it was the men on the creative floor and you're just like what the hell i'd have like one beer at lunchtime and i'd be bright red and i was like i can't work like i'll do this this is just like not good but he looked to my book and he was like wow and I can see the references to the artists and the photographers and and and just your general sort of like style of graphic design he's like you really need to go and talk to these three guys who have set up an agency called Brown's they're three partners they're ex oh god I can't even remember the name of the annual Addison yeah they were all ex Addison and Jonathan Ellery from Brown's was the first person I met he answered my letter so it was a not like I had to, and they'd been going at that point for maybe about a year.

13:35And yes, they were making a lot of art books for Magnum photographers, but they were commercial projects for like paper companies that were paying them money, but they were kind of connecting the dots and, and building kind of relationships. And John sort of went through my book and he like, was like, there's rivers running through your type. It's like terrible. And I was like, yeah, I want to learn. I want to do anything. I'm so up for it. And I like remember carrying those ridiculously giant portfolios that we all carried back over Tower Bridge to go back to Liverpool Street to go home going, oh, well, I really fucked that up.

14:13And I'm never going to get a job. And the next day they asked me to come back to meet the other two partners. I was like, whoa, to get an intern i'm going to meet three partners and i met graham and mike who were were wonderful and yeah then they asked me to come and do yeah what was called work experience back then and i was it uh i think it was very minimal slightly paid and i did make a lot of cups of tea so obviously that does not i'm pleased that doesn't exist in the same way but in truth everyone made cups of tea they had actually a chart in the kitchen which was all different Pantone chips of different shades of tea because everybody had a different request of the strength they liked it and like often I would bring John his cup of tea back and he'd be like Smithers he'd call me Smithers and he would be like did you run out of water like because he would be like half and I was like I had to make 11 cups of tea like how many times will I have to boil the kettle but anyway the truth is I got to meet artists like Paul Davis I helped him put his exhibition together there I just was allowed to throw in help and it was very kind of of of scrappy and like after three months they extended it then they extended it a little bit more and then it was sort of coming I think it was about six months and it was coming towards what the the the sort of internship well the yeah the work experience agreement where what we'd got to and they'd hired a senior designer which I remember is a guy called Jamie Roberts he now works at Apple but he was at C Design before that a certain era of design for anyone that knows all these agencies and he was just like he was so cool and he was coming and they were going to have a party for him to celebrate him joining and a leaving party for me and I was just like okay well at least I got to have this amazing experience and hopefully that will help me get another job but when I went to the party which was just in the office they gave me a box wrapped in brown paper and I opened it and it was my business cards and they gave me my first job so oh I love that that's fantastic yeah it was I mean the way they did it I was already crying before I'd even opened it thinking I was about to leave I'm a big crier because it was a bit less tension yeah yeah it was it was definitely you know people like to take me to the edge it's must have been terrifying yes it's an amazing story and after that like yeah it was just like I couldn't use a computer like we did not learn that properly at college so like Scott who's now one of the head people at Apple who was at Brown's who was one of the creative directors I have a notebook and I still have it back in New York in one of my boxes which is like all the shortcut keys for how to use the computer and he drew out like I was I was helping on something like here's the x height of the type and that's where the picture should lie not to the cat pie none like loads of things that kids just don't know all that kind of craft and detail how to set up grids how to do type it was we were geeking out and I was loving it and sort of learning and I got given my first little booklet which I think was for Munkin and I fucked it up 10 times and then another designer had to rebuild it for me but it was just like again I was allowed to sort of learn and fail and learn and fail which like there's obviously not that doesn't feel like there's not a lot of room to do that so I was so lucky to have that experience and then the first project I got was design a book for Susan Macellas which was Pandora's box and that ended up becoming a very famous sex book my mum says my granddad if I'd shown him would never give me any more money your parents must just be like what the hell I don't think she still knows what I do it's very confusing to her I think it's really easy to look at you now and your career and just think Like, well, obviously, you know, it must have been really easy and you're really talented, so therefore you've just sailed up to the top of where you are and it's all really...

18:07But it's really good to see sending out hundreds of CVs and really trying and failing at stuff and all that kind of thing. It's really important. And it's, you know, you don't get to meet people. Like now there are more talks, there's more things to go to. But a lot of us don't come from London. We're living in towns all outside in the UK and to come here, it's so expensive and it's such a treat in so many ways and definitely when I was a teenager I just could yeah was out of my I was up in Liverpool and there's no way yeah we go to Bristol and I think I got to see um David Carson talk at the Arthene which is like amazing but that was like my one thing that I remember seeing at college like you just didn't have the the access there wasn't the internet we have books and I was buying magazines and I was ripping things up and and yeah the references with being around the fine artists who would tell me about jenny savile or other painters and and just you know you were just like referencing a lot of other things that you and go to see music we obviously had glastonbury on our doorstep so we would sneak in the back which is a bit different but yeah and then when you finally do get your first job i just i i think you know my mom's she's always she has always pushed me or like where's she's always said Lisa like make yourself indispensable so I nothing was too low and even now like even working at Uncommon we're all pretty much hands-on nothing is below or beneath anyone that's great and I love that mindset when I've seen different points in my career where hierarchy has played a huge role or you know yes you've got to go and show the man in the room and rips up your work it's like fuck off like like get on the floor come and feel it and make it with us I love being part of teams that want to make and create it and do it together definitely yeah so so what was next what was after what was the next oh yeah I mean so yeah Browns I was there for five years we did some amazing things I got to work with Channel 4 on all their annual reports I got to work with all different artists and illustrators I did a book for Dries Van Noten and yeah after five years I sort of grown up to the senior designer role but again I think there's just I've come more to always accept it's like that you reach a certain point at a certain place and there is nowhere to really grow it's no reflection it's just like John built a practice around building up amazing like junior talent to senior yeah and there was always going to be one CD and DD and that would be a very rare window if that ever ever came open and I had a friend and she was like i saw an ad in the guardian newspaper for a designer at the victorian albert museum and i was she's like i think you should apply and i was like because i talked to her and i was saying like i don't really want to go to a competitor of browns i i don't want to go to see your mb studios or anything where it's like i loved browns it was so special and i i wanted to learn and do something different different that has also become a very common theme of my career in a weird way and i just was like the vna couldn't have been more of a special place to go and do that because you work alongside 3d designers you're with curators there was the architecture a lot of the building was undergoing a big transformation at the time but they had hundreds of people apply for this job and Jane was one of my partners.

21:42She's here tonight. She came, we used to work together at the V &A and she ran the design practice there. And it was just like, and there was Moira who sadly passed away, who was the head of London Museum and also of the V &A. She led a lot of the transformation, creative projects, the V &A. She was a designer who could look at architecture plans, who could think about space, who could think about curating talent to transform spaces and experiences. I think when I think back, her influence on my career is completely profound. First off, she's the only female leader I've ever worked for. Really?

22:19Wow. Which, you know, is sad or unfortunate, but I mean, Uncommon is very, and JKR were very kind of like female led in leadership. So it's amazing. And I do look for that and it's super important. But Maura was one of those very special, more again more one of these very special ladies that just really opened up my perspective in terms of like what you are capable of doing and so I got the job very luckily in front out of many people that applied for it and got to work on some amazing things whether it was permanent collections whether it was like working on exhibitions I remember doing this photography show called Twilight and the Magic Hour and you're giving a budget and you're literally giving a white box space and you transform what that space is with an idea in terms of like what you do you want the visitor to experience and take away from this it was very I just it was completely different than doing an annual report or doing a book or but you can see how you've taken that approach into the brands that you then work on yeah I mean I really looking at building the world that those brands live on or the experience that you want the consumer or the employee to feel inside or out is everything I think about when I build brands now.

23:34Yeah, absolutely. So how long were you there for? I was there for two and a half years. And that was, there was a gentleman who was ex-VNA who was like, you have an American passport, don't you? I know this guy who's set up a company in New York. Would you be open to going to New York? And that was the beginnings of like going to the States. Yeah, okay. So when you started at Wolf Olan's, that was in New York? No, no, no. No, I actually worked for a design company called Third Eye Design. It was a Scottish design company that then became Mark Creative, that then became Noe Associates is what it's known as today.

24:12So it's a gentleman called Mark Noe. He's very entrepreneurial and his businesses have sort of transformed over time. But we were doing a lot of hospitality work. I worked on like the Nolitan Hotel. I did restaurants for the Delicatessen and the Lion, which were very famous New York restaurants. We were working on all of this building called the Chicago Spire with Calatrava. So it was building again, sales experiences, materials, collateral. It was the thinking again about the full experience of how an identity lives. So it was really interesting and it got me to New York, which was really, really exciting.

24:51But then once I was in New York, I was like, what do I want to do next? and that's that was an interesting moment because I'm never going to lie about this I've danced with mother design for many years and I got to meet an incredible leader that worked at mother at the time who I'd been a design director at that point but pretty much running the studio of what was Mark Creative then and he was like I don't think you can come and work at mother because you haven't worked on big enough brands wow really even then yeah and so I was like middle finger I'm gonna move to San Francisco and go and work for moving brands and I'm gonna kick my ass into motion yeah and I did and I went to San Francisco and I was really excited because all the ex-browns crew pretty much worked at Apple but I was going to work at moving brands it was in the city and to be honest I was pretty lonely I thought at the time oh you can move and live anywhere and I've been in New York for two years and I was actually yeah I found it quite hard like I was working late nights the Apple crew will be on the bus going back and forth from Cupertino so they would only have time to hang out at the weekends and yeah I was just like I miss New York and I just started to make friends and it was starting to go really well so yeah moving brands pay for me to go there and this is the first time I've ever said it out loud but Warfowlis paid for me to come back and uh i had talked to wolf ollins kind of around the time that i was talking to mother and i was like and they were also having a really hard time at the time they had had a big bank called wow po that had gone bankrupt and and that affects like whole corners of your office who were like dedicated on these big projects and you realize how precious like client relationships are that they're also brands are in moments in time where you can't it's out of your control and but it affects your your business so at the time they couldn't hire me before I went to San Francisco but when um I started to want to talk about coming back to New York they were like the time is right now great and that was the beginning I essentially really of what I think of like kind of all of it coming together in terms of like this is branding this is what I do it's a form of sort of commercial art to me I'm not an artist I don't paint and I don't illustrate at the weekend I wish I did but I don't yeah um I live and breathe the the brands that I work on and the first one I got given was USA Today I'd literally joined the office Todd who was the ECD at the time who then went on to be the head of IBM he uh said to me here's a project for you Lisa gonna rebrand USA today good luck we want to see what you're made of oh my god to the whole office I was like whoa so what level did you go in on was that that was a design director level okay and of course like in theory I hadn't worked on brands that big even moving brands they've got HP at the time but I wasn't working on that I was doing kind of more the smaller startup pieces I was also working on things like sonic branding at moving brands which was really amazing I was but but a kind of crazy project we were doing sonic for IGT which is international gaming technology that make the chassis for the machines in Las Vegas and I had to re-come up with what is the sound of winning because they were moving coins and it was all going digital but those were like just amazing like learning projects and how you brief sonic and it's just the same as working like having territories and directions and and all of those things so all all of these experiences just i was like taking every opportunity so again by the time you get to like a wolf ollins and you get to work on usa today and it's a branding project and literally the client's saying we are the biggest paper in america that is completely dying new york times has taken over We're on digital, but we're the people's news.

28:56We're not left or right. Yeah. We publish it from the people's perspective. So it's kind of a mixture of left and right kind of in there. They were the colour newspaper before colour. They did Twitter before Twitter in their punchy headlines. They had infographic little stories. And so it was a huge, like, we have nothing to lose. How are we going to transform this business? So we started with the identity, which was kind of really holding them back. There was a big project. that there was another partner called fantasy interactive who led the digital which was really interesting in terms of like working where they hadn't metatagged any of the history of digital but we also needed to kind of move forward into the future so what was the future of news and news apps look like and it was just i that was where i got a massive appreciation for co-collaboration with the agencies i believe in that heavily we did that a lot at jkr there would be the sort of advertising and the design were backed up and partnered together obviously i'm very lucky and sort of uncommon and it's a creative studio and that all mixes as a melting pot together but here was just like my first experience of like oh i've got a partner agency we're going to do the the identity they're going to do the digital but secretly they were still making their revenue from the print advertising in the newspaper which was like like almost like a dirty secret and they were like can you design a newspaper and I was like yeah of course I can oh what have I said so I called up the guy who redesigned the Guardian he pretty much told me to go away did he uh I was like please do a workshop and teach me how to do it and he was like no you give me the job or go away and I was like cool I'm gonna go away and I'm gonna read a book how to design a newspaper and after watching one designer like struggle over one page for like three days I was like this isn't gonna work it's all a modular system which like the irony now I like sit in Figma and go oh my god it's all components a newspaper is all components yeah you design hundreds of headlines hundreds of bylines hundreds of different ways to do lock ups and then you obviously like guideline it and then you build it in a proprietary system it wasn't it was just the cool like the most coolest thing and I brought in all the right people a girl that just spent a week kind of typesetting the the tv section which in in design doing tabs which was really complicated and took ages but we together we we did that and then they were like well the ad agency isn't really getting like what we stand for and stuff and i was like i think we should build human infographics which is not an advertising idea by any shape or means but they were like we love that idea and then so we ended up getting that and i ended up having to call a friend that I'd met doing some photography shoots who was also like a tv producer and I was like oh my god we've sold three tv concepts I have no clue what to do and she's like I'm going to come to the office tomorrow and I'm going to take you through one-on-one like you're going to storyboard you're going to do this we're going to do the casting we'll do the art direction and then we'll go on set with the client and we will make it and I was just like cool held hounds somehow how we got through that which she shot a massive out of home campaign which was all over time square and it was just again the fear of just saying yes just saying yes and doing it and learning how to do it and yeah i got in a lot of trouble at warfollins for that job first off we went massively over budget the second which it did win lots of awards and pretty much sat in there their um new business like deck for like going on like five years so it sort of paid off in the end but it was they were like what are you doing we're strategic consultancy you are making things and I was like yeah you like doing yeah this is what I like doing and sort of that I did that for like seven years and we did amazing things there I worked on all sorts of crazy cool projects so obviously the Met yes obviously that's the one that that's the one everyone loves to talk about is the Met I mean the story I will always tell you about that is it was honestly the safest direction out of all the directions I presented and I remember like we were so close to selling an identity where every letter completely was like inspired by a different era of the collection and it would have been much crazier than doing a connected sans serif that caused so much stir.

33:32It did cause an exceptional amount of stir, but it's still there now, isn't it? It is. And I think it was a brilliant idea. Like I remember working on it with the strategists and it's like the idea that the Met was really struggling around making sure that the collections were relevant to the next generations. They weren't really struggling with like, they were the number one visitor attraction in America. it's just that they're not a fine art museum so like you've got things like victorian like dresses and tapestries from specific eras and egyptian things over there and blah like all this kind of like eclectic kind of very much you know like the vna is like a wing of the scale of what the met is but like all these kind of eclectic collections and what they were finding really hard is like these were just not connecting to the next generation so what we talked about was like when you have blockbuster shows like alexander mcqueen why can't you then curate shows of the collections around it that are his inspiration of of what led to that so we started to talk about can we connect artworks or our objects essentially all throughout the history of time to kind of make them more relevant it changed the the idea was life to art art to lives the the curators uh which was kind of a different difficult group to get on board i can imagine very difficult and uh they rewrote a lot of their labels in terms of like contextually making it relevant it was like a transformative kind of idea in the way that they curate behave and write about it and then the identity was like of course you can't have a symbol or logo that only stood for one moment in a history of time which is what the the traditional m symbol did which was harking back to just the sort of leonardo da vinci-esque moment in time it had to be something that could speak to all eras and allow kind of us to honestly clear up hundreds of thousands of pieces of print hundreds of thousands of pages on a website it was a huge undertaking and i work with this amazing typographer Gareth Hague based here in London on the Met word mark and yeah we did fuck it up a little bit in terms of we made it a little bit weird and and it was meant to be imperfect and I ended up having an argument with a friend in a restaurant whether it was left aligned right aligned or centered I was like it's it's basically it is what it is and it's gonna work ahead of its time in digital and app icons that didn't even exist back then so it was just it was an amazing project and I've never experienced backlash like it in my career and how did that feel that must have been quite yeah I mean we were well we were we were embargoed which was probably the right thing to do because if I had a glass of white wine I've been in the wrong place at the wrong time I've got the the the truth so it was I think what was the hardest thing was like when I look back and it was there There was a New York Times article and it was also partly to do with, again, a set of materials had been sent to some of the board for an invitation to an event that one of the board members had seen this identity without being told what it was and had gone and taken it to the New York Times.

36:51So it was a bit like what War Follins went through with the 2012 Olympics. You show it on a piece of paper six years before it comes out. You don't get a chance to tell your story. but also eventually you won't never get a chance to tell the real the story anyway but you do want a moment to be able to launch it with more of a narrative around it so we had to really I mean luckily the strategy was solid and grounded but like it was just watching people in the creative industries absolutely tear each other apart I was really insulted by people like Karen Rashid or um i can't think of this famous typographer eric speakerman i'm like who the hell is it like you to tell me about this and i was just it was before probably how you know like brand new and the amount of like yeah this whole like social culture of like ripping things apart and like existed this was done in a very public loud way and i found it really offensive by people that are in the creative industries now of course I will tell you all we're all entitled to our opinions and things like that but there is certain decorum and ways of doing it I don't feel it necessary to pull everybody apart and pull yeah things down today doesn't it oh I it really pisses me off it's just definitely but it it's yeah it really hurt and we did get to publish the right stories and what was amazing was the board and the executives of the Met stood by it strategically.

38:24And yes, it's actually been hugely successful since then. You will still, if this comes out, you are going to get a crazy amount of people that will kind of go, I still hate it. And then they will tag me and my social will blow up and you're like, get a fucking life. Totally. So tell me about JKR. what happened but so you were there for six years until very recently yeah yeah no that was a great I worked in between at Chobani which was an unusual in between was Chobani but that which is a very unusual because people were like you went to a yogurt company but it was like the there was it's the yogurt company it's a food company it is the and Hamdi Yulakai is the most interesting founder if you've never read a story about him he employs a certain number of refugees that were in the factories he yeah he's very progressive in terms of the way he puts brand and identity and design at the heart of the business and he believes in kind of transforming it and he's got to grow way beyond sort of greek yoga but it regardless it was an opportunity for me to build an in-house team that didn't kind of previously exist and i had two amazing partners kwami who's the the current president was the managing director and leela mashmeyer who was is the is the ceo at collins so he was more strategic he was an md and like the way kwame pitched it to me was just a bit like i will make anything happen you want to make happen and i was like can i make yogurt shops and can i make advertising can i make like all of this packaging it was pretty much like a maker's paradise and we curated the most hodgepodge mixed eclectic wonderful team from all over the world artists illustrators deliberately chose no one with actually a formal packaging background so that we could kind of blow up the perception I did learn my lessons at JKR when you start to do it on a much bigger scale uh yeah you definitely need people with with very good and solid kind of experience specialty but it really yeah that was an incredible experience and that must have been and after two and a half years i just couldn't make any more yogurt commercials um so were you there and then i went to jacob were you there when they launched the cafe uh they they'd already launched it but we sort of redesigned it yeah yeah and then we built big like trade show booths that kind of like would be modular and you could systemize and these were just like all these type of different kind of challenges and yeah and learning that you're the sort of client in that situation is the customer which is which isn't a the the person buying the yogurt cup it's actually the supermarket so I learned a lot about targets and walmarts and croakers and all of that which obviously many years later I worked on rebranding walmart but yeah it was it was it was really interesting experience and yeah i recommend anyone who gets to try to work in house it gives you a whole different understanding and empathy for the work you sell and how and the politics that have to go through to get the work through internal and i i've seen it even there where i'd have agency partners and they would present things and just think it would automatically happen you're like so awesome look at it so good and you're like yeah but I've got about 50 people to get this through and get buy-in and get budgets and scrape it all together in order to be able to make this happen and you have to find the best partners and that's when I made the best branding work is when I've built the best relationships with the in-house teams yeah absolutely yeah I think that's something that's coming out more and more isn't it just those partnerships rather than that in-house rivalry with agencies there's no such thing I mean you are an extension of their team yeah completely so then JKR yes extension of all the brands I worked on their team definitely um yeah I mean you worked on there and J.K.R.

42:30was a was such a huge opportunity in so many ways it was like a company that had existed for 33 years had worked a lot in like packaging and CPG and very kind of food and beverage led it was born of like abi was one of the founding clients some of them were ex-abi which for anyone that doesn't know that that's the company's own pub visor and uh stellar and corona and uh michelob ultra remember their top four the jkr people will be very happy i can remember that and it had incredible legacy in this kind of packaging history but in truth they had realized that a lot of the times when they were doing packaging they were actually informing the kind of identity like and distilling it down to almost the most core elements that would be on pack yeah but hadn't completely broken through interbranding now they had started they were they'd just done duncan which had got a lot of eyeballs in the sort of qsr space and yeah i i i met tosh when he gave me an award and the team at chobani an award uh an event and that was how we sort of got talking but to be honest it yeah it was a recruiter that sort of was like they really want to talk to you and I was like I'm not sure I want to go back to agency I missed the variety I did miss the variety that's what I've always loved about agency but the truth is in the house you could go so deep so I was like how am I going to be able to do that and then I'm not really a packaging person or I didn't think of myself yes we've done a lot of it at Shobani but I was like do I want to specialized and he was like no no the brief would be to build and grow the branding practice I want to be like the era when you were at Wolf Hollins and that was Tosh's brief to me and I was like okay I'm in and he's like but your first client would be Burger King and I was like I'm not in no way absolutely not it was so bad I work at Giovanni we make good food delicious and nutritious and natural and I can't work on Burger King and he was like and Sarah who is what is the sort of chief growth officer she was like well she was heavily pregnant she was trying to get me to sign the contract because she said like Tosha told me you have to sign this before I leave and I was like and she said I just think Burger King isn't quite what you think it is Lisa I would love you to like learn a bit more about it hear what the opportunity is and the first sort of project for them was going to be about removing all the artificial ingredients from the food and I remember going to tell Hamdi that I was going to leave Chobani and my first client was going to be Burger King and it was a very interesting conversation and he was like you have to be in the game you have to be in the game to change the game like you need to go and work with all the big bad ones and like help them be better even if it's just shifting the needle that stuck with me with Hamdi what he said then because it was just like yeah yeah I can't be so like oh I only want to go and work on purpose-led projects and do this stuff I have to go and work with the bad ones and try and make them better yeah albeit I will not work on obviously some certain categories yeah there's a limit to that especially working on things like Burger King if they're removing all the artificial stuff yeah that's a good thing to do yeah and Burger King was a wild ride and it coincided with an incredible in-house creative leader yes there was Fernando Machado who was the global chief marketing officer of RBI at the time which is Popeye's and Burger King and Tim Tim Hortons but Rafa Abru who's now the global head of design at Coca-Cola had joined there to be the head of design and he was like yeah we talked about that we cannot like it wasn't a rebrand brief it was really to do some kind of like communication sticks and kind of claims on the packaging to say that they were removing the artificial ingredients and I was like but your whole brand looks artificial your logo looks artificial the experience is like not good the the restaurants don't look like the uniform which don't look like this it's it feels crummy and gross and people don't feel like good about eating the food and so he was like yes and that the elephant in the room is the is the logo and I'm sorry I know I know the lady who did the previous one and it was the right thing for that era this is a different era where we we needed to change the whole brand identity in order to change the impression of the brand yeah hugely successfully it's been a gold can line it's pretty yeah i know i mean that's an it's that's an interesting one we won a lot of dna d pencils but not a yellow pencil uh but uh yes it was and i think by that point when we were at Cannes it had got all the a lot of the statistics and things like that that were backing it in terms of like how it was performing and so it's really unusual for a piece of work like that to do well at Cannes too I mean Cannes is very a very conceptual led awards that very much suits more kind of the advertising creatives design doesn't normally show up there so for design to go all the way it was like it was amazing but unfortunately it was in the pandemic so I never got to go and get it or go on the stage you know have to try it again and keep trying what was your favorite project at jkr oh my favorite one i mean yeah like different ones for different reasons warm up for the sheer sort of tenacity of the team that took two years wow i think impossible getting to partner with um the ceo peter mcginnis who was the cmo from x from chobani and redefine what meat is um yeah and and really work on a product that is so in its early infancy like it's going to be something we're all in 10 years but it is such a huge journey in terms of like introducing foods that are going to affect our our climate people care about what they eat the balance of kind of eating meat and becoming kind of it was just a really really interesting project but in some ways the sweetest one was Manny Shevitz which was again getting to curate a really interesting team working on a beloved American beloved Jewish food brand and bringing all the charm and sort of all the eclecticism I have never met such nice clients in my life who I've come from a little place called Wendon Zambo near Saffron Warden in Essex and to work with the Hasidic Jewish community on a project like that and curate a really interesting sort of team to be able to tackle it it was just I learned so much and I love learning on projects and like getting the vibes eating the food experiencing everything and I it was just a really special project for for all of the reasons I think the team and the client relationship so obviously you're at Uncommon Now very recently yes can I ask a question that I know you get asked a lot when's the right time to leave a job oh yes the big question and I think it kind of goes back to that brown the browns thing I think was more like there was nowhere really more for me to grow a lot of the times it's where I've like learned everything I can there like or like I've I feel like I've soaked it up and I want to take it on to something to new I think or I've been really surprised about something that's come up like the Chobani thing I was not looking for that I could not have even planned that but it was you know I couldn't even yeah manifested it in any shape or form and then i think even with with with jkr to uncommon i'd fulfilled the brief that tosh wanted me to fulfill yeah and i it just felt like time and i that was the hardest thing because when you love all the people you work with and the work that you do but you're just you're hungry for something else to push you to challenge you and boy i've landed in somewhere that's going to push be a challenge me yeah definitely so can I ask you finally what's your top tips for young people starting out in the industry today how do they how do they get themselves noticed yeah I mean obviously there has to be a level of tenacity in terms of like don't give up like keep writing keep trying to meet keep going to things connections link like Instagram messages anyway way if you do it in the right way it's not annoying I get lots of LinkedIn messages I almost try to reply to almost all of them there'll be the odd one that slips slips through but I I really do try even if I don't have time to meet people to respond or to connect them to someone else that I know that that might be able to to help them I think being indispensable this whole kind of thing of like the willingness to be thrown down to be part of the team to to nothing is too small like always offer like when you finish your day to offer to help someone else like those things just they don't go unnoticed like it's like it's a certain attitude a certain feeling and a vibe like i don't work well with people who come from a very sort of like expect it all to fall on their lap i i think it's a level of hunt a little bit in terms of it i you know and go for it and don't be embarrassed and i've made it don't be embarrassed like of myself many times many inappropriate things i'm sure and i but i'm not afraid to say i've up or anything like that so it's just always like put yourself out there really kind of drive and then obviously like ideas and craft and stuff like that that all does matter but I didn't have it all at the beginning I only need to see a nugget in some of the things that like someone might show me and and that's enough to go on and then to give someone a chance I I really do appreciate it's been so hard sort of post-pandemic getting agencies and in-house teams to bring on younger talent yeah and making the room and the time to nurture that talent it's be it's but it's something i'm committed to something dean ad is committed to and it's so important like like like i can't stress enough that the world needs dean ad and we need dean ad because they help bring the next level of talent into our industry new blood's amazing shift's amazing as well it's so good yeah and people don't know that enough and i am gonna spend my next year shouting it from the rooftops fantastic yeah i hope you do that have we got time for a couple of questions we're running a little bit over but has anyone got a question they'd like to ask lisa can you share what you're working on no no i mean we're working on all different types of things and they're all very different i think again like uncommon is a creative studio so there's a mix of like what we call core but there is obviously a lot of kind of like advertising work but not the type of advertising work that you think of traditional advertising agencies then we are doing brand projects and some of it comes in through the design door and some of it comes through the sort of core comms door and then it's all about how we collaborate and make and create together and we've got anything from yeah products and tech it's every single category that I could have ever hoped for and I think what I'm sort of navigating in at the moment is how to bring all the right I'm getting to like know everyone and bring all the right minds together to help sort of answer the brief in the best way so it's it's I I am so excited but I'm also my head is spinning around quite a lot right now.

54:39I can imagine. Thank you so much. This has been brilliant. Thank you so much, Claire, for having me.