New decade, new clients, same great team

From new clients to new starters, 2019 was a pivotal year in our development and growth. More capacity, more skills and more work meant that desk space became a precious studio resource.

Early in the year, ALE Heavylifting, Avery Weigh-Tronix, Informa, Protolabs, Cirium and about ten other embargoed names joined the Freestyle wall of fame, aka ’the portfolio’, keeping the studio buzzing throughout the year. Workshops, builds, updates, roadmaps, designs and a whole load of code, analysis and UX outputs kept the creative, technical and strategic juices flowing.

The last month of the year also welcomed a pitch win for an extensive project which will run throughout 2020 and a dream client! Not bad for December...

Talent and expertise was one of the main internal focus points of 2019. A whole load of new Freestyle hoodies needed to be ordered as we welcomed new roles to strengthen our strategic offering:  Innovation Director, Insights Manager, Head of People and Experience, Marketing Director. The increase in work and new partners meant we also added two more members to our support team and a couple of Account Directors to our client services team.

On the culture front, our perks saw the addition of ’steal-a-day’ and new roundtable sessions around mental health. We were shortlisted for the Working Families Best Practice Awards, against Deloitte and Morgan Sindall and we came third in the UK's Top 25 SME Culture Leaders. Our Freestyler Kay Edwin made it to Top 20 UK's most influential business developers in BD100, and Becki Hemming was awarded the “Young Tech Talent” award at the West Midlands Tech Awards.

For a third of our team, January kicked off with a 2-day trip to Bedfordshire for a stakeholder workshop. Tonic 05 is a few weeks away, and we’re welcoming Monzo, Babylon Health and HM Passport Office as speakers. 

2019 was fun year, here’s to a fantastic 2020!