#66 - Joe Rampley & Eli Baillie - Forest [Creative Brand Manager & Creative Producer]

0:00Hello, hello, hello and welcome back to the founders. Today I'm joined by the wonderful Joe and Ellie from Forest. Now Forest are an e-bike company based in London. You'll have seen the bikes riding around, dark green, brown accents. They have over 20 ,000 bikes now in 18 different boroughs. But I wanted to get to know the people working behind the teams. Who's involved? How do they do this? Logistically, how do you run an operation of that size? And what is it like making the creative content and making people connect with that daily commute? I personally am guilty of having never used them, but I feel inspired to go out, give it a go next time I'm in London.

0:33So it was really nice to get to know Joe's background, Ellie's background. What is it about this opportunity and this business they want to work for? And there's so much in this, I think you're going to love it. So without further ado, let's get on with the episode. We all know that brand is important, right? But what if I told you it can impact growth and customer acquisition costs by up to 50 %? Against Ordinary are a brand agency who help founders, marketing departments, scaling teams ensure their brand is the most powerful tool for growth. From brand strategy, tone of voice, and visual identity, to helping you get retail ready with ongoing brand growth attainers.

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1:28hello and welcome back to unfounders today i'm joined by the wonderful joe and ellie so please can you let everyone know where you work and what your role is there please i'm joe rampley i'm the creative brand manager at forest and i've been here for four years so when i started there was there was no forest bites on the streets of london and now there's 20 000 so it's been a It's been a wild four years. And I'm Ellie and I'm the creative producer at Forrest. I joined about a year ago and I work with the brand team to help bring to life all of our marketing campaigns. Fantastic. For those who have never heard of Forrest, give us the spiel like what is Forrest?

2:03Where are you? What do you do? Forrest is London's homegrown shared e-bike. So a shared e-bike, for those that don't know what a shared e-bike is, is a bike that you can rent on the streets of cities, major cities, using an app. and they're free floating so they're not docked they're kind of a free floating model and they're all electric and so there's a huge benefit there in terms of um yeah ease of use is really really great for them forest generally and we are the most sustainable and most affordable in our market uh in terms of shared e-bike which obviously sets us apart on the rest um and yeah that's forest really so for for you guys like what what was it about the brand or the opportunity that when i want to work there like e-bikes this is this is where my calling like i can't imagine even of you growing up were like yeah that's that's what I'm going to do when I'm older I started out doing graphic design illustration I did that as a degree but I always had a keen interest in cycling personally but more of the casual cycling and kind of the unprofessional yeah not not the lycra basically that the other side of cycling and and so when this job came up I saw this job advertised and it felt like it was a merge between those two interests design and cycling and also casual cycling something that I've been you know a lot of people avidly casually cycle but I felt like there is a nice cultural meaning to casual cycling that maybe isn't as prevalent in the UK compared to countries like countries like the Netherlands you know those kinds of countries it's not as a prevalent yet and so it felt like a great opportunity to mix two of my interests and that's how I joined Forrest I don't know if your experience was different to that Yes, slightly.

3:39I mean, I have only ever worked in startups and love working in startups. I think it's my thing. And I saw this one come about. It was originally for a partnerships job. And I thought it was really interesting how you could bridge marketing and travel all in one. I thought it was a really novel thing that we're doing in that sense. So that was a good opportunity, but also because myself and all of my friends absolutely love the brand already and used Fires bikes. And I just thought, this is really intriguing. And I wanted to be a part of that. Well, that's actually how we first connected, as I saw one of your most recent campaigns regarding helmets.

4:21Now, this is a hot topic that I'm all over. It really frustrates me when you see parents cycling without a helmet, but their children have helmets. And I love this latest campaign that you did. It was a bit kind of more fun, more creative. So Ellie, I'd love to dive into that because I just thought firstly, the imagery was great, but what the actual message behind the campaign, it really was like, yeah, that absolutely makes sense and needs to be talked about. Yeah, of course. I mean, as you said, cycling safety has always been a hot topic in London, particularly. And because we are so London centric and orientated, we felt it was important to speak on this, not only to educate our own audience, but to also make sure that other riders are safe or pedestrians are safe and that sort of thing.

5:02So we wanted to do cycle safety in a way that felt fun because a lot of the stuff that you kind of see is a bit dull and it's a bit dry and it's, you know, it's the same kind of stuff. But how do you make the same information being relayed? Super engaging, really fun, funny, something that people actually want to do, but also educates them about safety. I think also a lot of stuff when it comes to safety is kind of common sense, which is where we came up with the common sense quiz thing. and just sort of playing on fun pop culture references to make it relevant. And it feels Instagrammable. It feels culturally relevant.

5:39I'm not preachy, I think. Yeah, I don't know if you have anything to add, Jo, but I did the quiz and it just made me laugh each time. I was just like, it's just very obvious what the correct answer is. But it's just those things when it's so obvious, it's like, well, why are more people doing it? It's exactly it. It's just the embodiment of common sense. Ellie mentioned it. it's very hard to add a feeling of personality or fun or risk to something that's a very serious topic and obviously one thing to point out is forest regards safety as a top priority but if we were to educate people on this we don't want to bore them to death we want them to have an experience that makes them think and makes them laugh so you've kind of described some of the questions there Mitch it's it's a feeling of engagement and even if you do get it wrong the question wrong it will give you a message a tongue-in-cheek message about getting it wrong at that question for example so that was something that we really wanted to embody in the in the quiz itself hopefully that was basically like two weeks of us sitting in a room like right what response to this question would work what if we put a sign that says diversion and it said you can either take the diversion or use the use the sign as a ramp like which one would you rather which is the most correct way to do it and so immediately the more stupid we made it I think the better it became so we just ramped up the stupidity like the helmet question would you rather you know what's safer to wear in London a helmet or a cool fedora it's like pretty obvious which is safer so yeah yeah and it felt fresh I think it's not something that any other kind of cycle safety thing that I've seen has done and so I think that was important to not make it feel like the same continuous messaging and people actually reading taking the time to read all those little error messages or the right one because there's something funny or a little easter egg in there so yeah yeah I saw the obviously the sticker pack and the photo I never actually got my stickers so I'm still waiting for those to arrive I need I need it on my water bottle like anyone listening will know I always talk about my water bottle it's just covered in FMC juice stickers and I need these common sense club ones because yeah just brilliant but from the forest kind of working perspective like how big is the team now like 20 000 bikes that's like a logistic operation rather than necessarily being a travel company like that it must be some crazy like maintenance and and all of that but from an actual business perspective do you have an office what's your working environment like i'd love to dig into a bit more behind the scenes because i'm sure a lot of london-based listeners will be like oh yeah i use forest all the time like this is quite interesting so we have kind of a um an office space in moorgate where there's about 30 people but we also basically have our tech team in Chile because our co-founders are Chilean.

8:23So a lot of our tech team, most of our tech team are based in Chile. So that makes up a kind of a big proportion of our team as well. And then obviously, as mentioned, we have lots of operational staff in London and we've got multiple warehouses, workshops across London. And so, yeah, the heart of the company very much is based in London because we are only in London, but that's how the team is split. But one thing to note about forest is um it is just this team so if you compare it to those around us and in our market we are teeny tiny and in that respect it gives us um loads of creative freedom which is great and also brand freedom development of everything we do is is in this office you know what i mean or in our office in chile or in our workshop the small nature of it feels really like beneficial for us to make cool shit don't know if I can swear apologies I think it also uniquely positions us because we're Londoners ourselves so we like it's kind of what we want out of a product or kind of how we would want to use the bikes and you've probably like people who've used for us have probably cycled past us on the street and it's just that kind of pride of knowing that we're London born and all of us you give them a weird smile and they're like what and you're like I had this really great moment where this person had been not been using forest for a really long time and they were struggling to end their ride or know how to end their ride and we'd just been doing a marketing activation I have this huge logo essentially and I was like walking past with this massive board and I went sorry do you need a bit of help she was like yeah I don't know how to end my ride and I was like oh I actually work for forest and I had this massive pine tree and it It was just like a really nice moment.

10:06You get to actually connect with the users. I had a great moment a couple of weeks ago as well where I was just stood by a bike and I was replying to a text before I started cycling. And someone came up to me and they were like, oh, do you need help? It's going to be a bit confusing sometimes. And I was like, thank you so much, but I actually work for Forrest. So it's all good. But I think it just speaks to our users and our audience. We have such an incredible community that we've built at Forrest, which is so nice to see so and it's massive that's the other crazy thing about it i recently wrote on linkedin that we're four years old but now nearly 20 percent of london's population have the forest app and it's really mad to get your head around as a as a brand that is solely in london that is focused on being a london founded business that's can succeed to think that in four years 20 percent of the population have the app on my phone is uh quite amazing to think yeah that's that's big um and i'm sure collaborations and partnerships are a big part of that and i'd love to know any other kind of great examples or some of your favorite campaigns you've worked on because um what comes to mind with me is when the recent tube strikes were happening i saw some guerrilla style marketing from like exo soda or perfect ted where they were just putting flyers and things in the baskets or on the bikes just being like hey like while the tube's gone enjoy this from us so i'd love to know like any campaigns or things that you guys have done that you're like yeah this one was a real big hit.

11:27I suppose London is our home which is really kind of repositioning the brand as London's homegrown shared e-bike and so as we were developing that idea we were thinking what is it about being London's homegrown shared e-bike that sets us apart from the competitors, from multi-conglomerates, from all of these big brands that are kind of in London and the idea was to focus on London is our home. With that London is our home because we as forest workers rides around London we cycle with our customers every day on the way into work but also London is our customers home our riders home and so there's that commonality between the two so we decided to basically invite our riders to be a part of a huge community series across the 18 boroughs that we serve so that task was basically for Ellie to figure out how to photograph 18 riders in 18 boroughs over four days which was mental I don't think you want to touch on that yeah I mean it was my first project as a creative producer at Forrest definitely got thrown in at the deep end but it was so rewarding to be able to actually speak to so many of our customers we had over 500 applications and to narrow it down to 18 street cars essentially these aren't people that generally are used to being on camera, interviewing them, like testing them on camera and to see if they were personable and that sort of thing was so nice to be able to hear their stories.

12:53And I really felt that we started to build this really nice community series, asking them what home meant to them. And it wasn't about the bikes. We didn't want it to be this commercial sell. We wanted it to really showcase what London is and the best of London and why we are here and how we help these people get about their day-to-day lives and that's what I think was so nice about the campaign was that it didn't it wasn't selly in any way we were just like just tell us about yourself and what do you like doing on a Sunday morning to give you an example of some of the responses we've had from these people so as mentioned we go to every borough we went to four five boroughs a day we go to there we meet the person from so Hugo that lives in Greenwich we meet up with him we interview him about what home means to him and the kind of stories we got from these people were for example Hugo telling us that is I think it was his grandfather or his great-grandfather used to paint on the Meridian line in Greenwich before it was brass so he told us this really unique amazing story about his heritage and that came from a brand campaign that's selling bikes but it's you know what I mean it's like maybe sometimes it's worth ignoring your product and focusing on what your community gives to London or they're rich stories so yeah as Ellie mentioned it was was tough but i think what came out of it was worth the tough journey that we went through that four days um yeah no i love that yeah i think that's really good when brands kind of focus on the community and it's just like it's not all about us i think it's the same even with linkedin content like it's not just always like hey look at what i've done look at this it's like actually what value can you give what what as a a brand or as a person working in a brand what is it you can actually share with your community and your following um i think that's like such a nice campaign and again it makes people feel like oh that's like my story or like everyone will kind of have someone or something in that that they connect with or it will make them question it as well so it's more than just being oh it's just my bike from here to here it's like actually like oh no like i buy into this and i like it i'd love to now kind of dig back into both of your working careers to like how you got here today because as i said at the start i can't imagine either of you were like that's what i'm going to do when i'm older so um joe starting with you growing up what was your vision were you always creative you always like i'm going to be doing this when i'm older um or was it kind of actually i'm quite good at this i think i was always somewhat creative my dad used to sit me down at his laptop open microsoft paint and just let me draw draw shit and that was literally my kind of origin into just creating does that make sense not the scribbles and then fill in the gaps basically that no modern modern day do not know that joy they don't and there was no hard lines like it was you literally you just had a a squiggly line creating a house you know what I mean so um yeah I used to love that uh anyway and then basically I moved into doing that for a degree graphic design and illustration um but after after that I tried to go freelance in graphic design and illustration but at that time as I was freelancing after uni I became a Deliveroo cyclist at the same time so I was kind of supplementing my freelance career with doing Deliveroo on the side in Manchester at the time.

16:00Randomly, as I was doing that, I got approached by Deliveroo to be on the one show, really random. Basically, they were looking to showcase what Deliveroo was. This was like 2013, 2014. How do you showcase what Deliveroo is? It was a new concept at the time. I went and did it. I was on the one show on a segment of it. And then from that, I basically asked whether I could do a design internship it there because I was like this isn't in and they said yes I went down to London did a design internship at Deliveroo and that kind of kick-started my in-house career after that internship so it was kind of a yeah and as mentioned I was always into bikes I was a delivery cyclist I loved my bike and and then as mentioned that the forest job came up and it felt like something that merged design and cycling and I was like okay this is this is great um so it felt a perfect alignment and that is how i got into forest really that was that was the journey love that i think that's such a like it's such a like unique story as well and having that like deliveroo design crossover to then do forest yeah you couldn't have kind of had a better kind of leeway into it yeah and then weirdly recently the delivery did some out of home um out of home advertising on on the back fender of the forest bikes so it felt like a full circle moment um even though no one at Deliveroo ever remembers me because I was an intern for like two months.

17:23But hey, it's nice to think that the brand that you worked on as an upstart, as a young creative, you end up kind of facilitating their ads on your bikes. It's quite a nice... Love that. And how about you, Ellie? What was your dreams and aspirations growing up? And how did you kind of progress to where you are? I think mine's a bit of an interesting story because I started out in law, which is very different to marketing. But I think always growing up, I'd been quite naturally creative. My parents put me in like music school and drama school. I always did art all the way through school and loved writing and that sort of thing.

18:02So naturally, I was that way inclined. where law came in I'm not entirely sure I just thought it was a great degree to do and my parents were very happy with it so I went to uni and did law and thought that's what I wanted to do and actually I wanted to specialize in like media law or something like that ended up going down a more commercial route and realizing it just wasn't for me so went to uni and did a master's of research and I studied human geography and was really interested in people and spaces and sort of more environmental topics and sustainability which then whilst I was doing my master's I joined a startup proper startup it was like two three people called Hazzar where I was head of Hazzar in Birmingham which feels like a wildly inflated title for my first job but it was a great opportunity to start up this business which essentially was an online student marketplace very similar to vintage Depop but for just students in that area so instead of shipping things you would meet up on campus and exchange an item my job was to grow that user base to 4 ,000 users in Birmingham throughout my network and that job taught me a lot about confidence and resilience I was literally out there with cardboard signs giving away jam donuts so people would download the app it was you know very very like in its infancy at the time and that led me to a love for startups essentially and this idea of like growth and strategic growth innovative marketing ideas that sort of thing and I was like oh I kind of like that and then I moved on to work for another startup in strategic growth and then it kind of just snowballed from there I'd mainly worked from like digital marketing and that sort of thing and strategic partnerships again and it was just kind of a process of from pivoting from law to marketing and now production it was just kind of fine-tuning what it is that I really enjoyed out of each job and then yeah ended up in this place which I absolutely loved I love that um now normally I ask like oh what do you do outside of work like from like team activities you do like a lot of the time when people are office based going out and doing something like a group ride or a group something or other is is the way but I imagine for you guys is it much more like no we want to sit down and like not move like what are we going to do so from a outside of work perspective like what what are the kind of things that you guys like to do to unwind or relax or enjoy yourselves is that within the forest ecosystem or personally uh both would be good to know so if anyone's listening going oh i love forest like this sounds great like how do i get involved what's actually like i wonder if they just cycle everywhere like is that all they do what do you do as a team and then individually what's your switch off like for me it's very much like finish work i just want to spend time with my daughter to then just crash on the sofa for a bit and get a bit very simple as a team we love a barbecue as mentioned our co-found our founders two of our three of the of the co-founders are Chilean so they love a barbie uh and especially in the first few years of forest we spent many a time in the in the kind of in the warehouse in the center of kind of parking of the warehouse of our bikes just eating eating barbie barbecue and it was really great bonding exercise a lot of uh pisco because that's their kind of national drink, Piscola, which was new to me at the time.

21:22I'm a bit sick of it now, if I'm honest. I've had quite a lot of it. But that culture really came through in terms of this Chilean-English kind of merge really became a strong part of Forrest because, yeah, a lot of fun in doing that. And that hasn't stopped. Maybe it's a little bit less now with the fact that we're massive and it's always quite hard to find those times. But I feel like that is really true to what Forrest is. in the downside in the you know in the down times it's a celebration of that and yeah personally if i'm trying to switch off anywhere that there's not forest bikes in the in the vicinity of where i am helps because basically the the kind of the blessing and curse about forest is your brand that you work for is everywhere and that is a blessing because it's you know everyone knows about your product really the curse is you can't get away you genuinely cannot get away so you can open the door on a Saturday morning, waking up just about to walk the dog, there's a forest bike there.

22:18You can't escape work in that respect. So I'd suggest going to Richmond Park and going for a walk where there's Lycra cyclists, not forest cyclists. So you don't see many forest bikes. That's what I would do. Nice. Yeah, I would also say that even though we work with bikes every single day, I think we're all still completely obsessed with bikes and taking bikes everywhere. If it's like a 15-minute walk, we're like, well, I'll just get a bike. So, yeah, I would say that. And there's a real strong energy throughout the whole team of this like real team energy, which is really, really nice. And I guess what I would do to unwind, I enjoy boxing.

22:57It's very cathartic and moves your upper body more so than your lower body, like cycling. Marties, yoga, you know, all that sort of stuff. We're quite an active office, really. So lots of sports and things like that. I love that. I'm very guilty of like I'm the one who will happily go on like a 10 mile walk I absolutely love walking and if I'm ever in London I never really think to use the bikes now I I live outside of London so you either drive everywhere or you get a train or something so the usage of a bike whereas when you live in London I think it's just so ingrained as like that's what you do but to anyone else like me like what how does it work like obviously download the app find a bike like go through that process for someone like me so next time I'm in London you're like you know what I should probably give it a go because I am very guilty of never having used a forest bike never having used any other competitive one other than maybe in another country where actually I've just grabbed a scooter so yeah like what's that's the way you kind of get people in and what's the the main kind of benefits of it other than saving time because obviously cycling's faster than walking for sure I think um obviously download the app from the app stores forest bike um and then I think the deceiving thing about forest and this is common with brands that aren't as bright as other brands is that you don't realize how many there are until you actually start recognizing the brand.

24:13And that's something we've always had, you know, it's always been a part of Forest. So we're dark green in our color palette. We've got brown tires and brown kind of accents, a brown seat and brown handlebars. So visually it's not as striking on the street, but once you start using the Forest app and start using the Forest Bikes, you'll notice that there is a lot of Forest Bikes. We are the second biggest e-bike operator in London. and we're across 18 boroughs so that's 18 of the most central boroughs as well if you think about it i think london has maybe 30 boroughs but they go way out but the kind of more central 18 ones it's it's a huge area of london that you can use forest bikes um so yeah i would suggest obviously it would be down in the app and just checking the map to see what what bikes are available in your area and then i suppose one benefit in terms of what forest gives to our riders is free ride minutes and this is something that's ingrained in our brand basically um what sets us apart from the rest in terms of pricing is that after you unlock the bike for one pound you get um you get a kind of a range of ride minutes free ride minutes and that's based upon whether that bike needs to move or not so that's kind of a interesting concept that basically helps our operations move bikes more efficiently but also helps our riders with discounts so that's kind of embedded into our brand as kind of a usp that can lower that cost for the users you know i think in was it 2020 gave away 14 million minutes 14 yeah 14 million minutes um which is insane so yeah i think having that user at the front of the minute kind of structures is something that we try to encourage but i also think like for me i wasn't a massive cyclist before i joined forest It was always something I was a little bit nervous.

26:03I was a little bit scared of. I would only ever cycle with my mates. And since getting into being more of a cyclist and finding that freedom, there's this element of like almost childlike freedom that you have. Like when you get on a bike for the first time and you feel all of the senses, like the wind in your hair, you can smell things. You see London in a completely different way. And for someone that's not cycled before or would want to start cycling again, I would say like tap into that sort of inner child a little bit. And it's, yeah, it's quite, it's quite, what's the word? Addicting, essentially.

26:38Yeah, it's, you feel like a superhero when you get on an electric bike. It's weird. You feel like the boost makes you feel like you're superhuman. And I think that is a really interesting USP for a brand, right? You feel a different way to the way you'd usually feel. and so just innately e-bikes give you that so that's a plus in our market generally right i think it took me a while to realize they were actually like electronic other than the fact of like unlocking them and using that side i was like these people are so fast around here and i was like oh that's probably that explains it now no that's brilliant i will definitely be giving it a go next time i'm in london because i'm in all the time but i'm always like oh i'm gonna jump on this tube and i'm gonna walk this bit and blah blah blah it's just not ingrained in me to do it but yeah you've inspired me i'm gonna gonna get involved just see me uh getting on my forest bike but what's what's next for the the brand and the business like what what are you guys doing is there any anything to look out for over christmas into 2026 like what are we looking for as we move forward i think we're just really getting to grips with our new positioning which is that we're really celebrating being london-based the london-based business and our london-based brand so in terms of creative in terms of brand we want to build upon that further and i think we've only just got started in that respect.

27:54So I think you can expect more of the same emotional content, content that feels true to being a Londoner, because I think that's how we really stand out in our market. So that would be kind of a creative focus. And I think the whole business's focus is that as well, maybe, in that we want to make London our real, it already is our home, but we want to really, we want everyone else to know that, you know everyone to know that this is a london-based success story so that would be the trajectory i can think of yeah no i love that and now this is a final couple of questions this is one that i like to ask everyone regarding music so i'll give you time to prep this one so i don't know if you have songs individually or if there's one song you're like this is the forest anthem like what is a song that comes to mind when you're like this is a song that represents me my working career or forest i've got loads i've got loads i've got um i've got so many do you know the drums let's go surfing it's like uh it's an old it's like a noughties indie tune we started using it in videos back in the day like when we first started and it just became a part of all the videos we made and it's just this upbeat feeling of yeah i don't know it works well with being on a bike at one point i wanted to do a cover of it that says let's go cycling instead of let's go surfing but i thought that could be that could be a step too far but um that maybe sums up some of the journey but i've got loads i don't know about you yeah i mean for me like one that i thought of was maybe can't slow down by almost monday i feel like we're so fast paced and everything happens really quickly and our industry is incredibly reactive uh so that's a fun one um i feel like that also just encompasses me as a person i think never stops maybe like life is a roller coaster really something like that that's that's been on a few times yeah i think obviously like can't start red hot chili peppers be another one like it's always kind of like emotive like fast upbeat songs yeah love it but yeah i'll add them to the playlist i've got this wild eclectic playlist building now from everyone's suggestions and there's all the classics like queen and we had cindy lauper recently to now these ones uh so i'll add those in no this has been really really interesting i think the the business is fantastic i love the encouraging people to get out get active actually doing it in a way that's sustainable and good for the planet i think it's really really positive um and i mean 20 000 bikes now let's see where you guys are in this time next year but for anyone who wants to get hold of you guys personally or find out more about either trying to work at forest or actually just giving forest to go for the first time where is the best place to connect or find these details we're on the socials at forestbike underscore uk and then our careers site is on forest.me on our website if you want to check out the careers and our linkedins are probably best to reach us personally and we're always open to ideas in our sector about creativity and about branding so yeah we're all it if no one has opinions of that and if there's any brands listening from a collaboration point of view like what's the what are the kind of collaborations and things you look for like when it when it comes to something like that like with with pact obviously we're frozen fruits and vegetables like i don't know is that if there's crossover there at all so it's like how do you how do you find brands to work with and what's the best way to kind of engage in that and go actually i've got a really good idea i want to work with you we're honestly super open to sort of anything like we love doing completely new things novel things um yeah i mean just let's see what we can create essentially yeah if the Tate want to hit us up got a few we've got a few uh yeah we'd love to work with some some uh London icons basically love that cool we'll watch this space but no this has been absolutely brilliant thank you so so much for your time I really enjoyed it thank you thank you and to everyone listening thank you so much we will see you on the next episode goodbye