Meet the Sponsors of the LBB & Friends Beach 2023: Girl&Bear

For our company snapshot piece, we want to create a profile that pinpoints exactly what makes your company unique right now in 2023. We want to know about the culture and the competitive edge that you bring as well as finding out how the company has evolved over the past couple of years as new tech and changes in the market have disrupted the industry.

Q> When and why was your company founded?

Girl&Bear was founded in 2021 and is the home of all the makers at VCCP. 

Content creation and production was something VCCP had always offered to clients but in creating Girl&Bear we saw a brilliant opportunity to elevate our production offering globally.

Q> Give us an elevator pitch for your company!

Girl&Bear exists to deliver craft without compromise. 

We are a fully integrated global content creation studio, and it’s our passion to make great ideas come to life in all channels, and deliver it to the right people in the right context…with ease. 

At Girl&Bear we make the world of making easy to navigate, with a simple, human approach, backed by technology.

Girl&Bear brings fresh approaches to production through new ways of making, new technologies, innovative production techniques, and by ensuring we partner with the best and most exciting talent.

Q> What sets your company apart from others in the industry?

Girl&Bear challenges the modern production dilemma of choosing between beautifully crafted creative, or efficient delivery of assets at scale. Too often the choice has been a binary one: either craft, or scale. At Girl&Bear we fundamentally challenge this, and use the right balance of our human touch paired with technology solutions to give the same level of love and craft clients get at the ideation stage to every single asset. 

Q> How big is your team and where are your key locations?

Girl&Bear has 200+ makers around the world with key hubs in London, Prague and North America. 

Q> How would you describe your company culture?

We are the cheeky little sister to VCCP.

The Girl&Bear team is passionate about making great work, and having fun whilst doing so. Girl&Bear is built around a culture of connection, collaboration, authenticity, and openness. 

We are proud to have created an environment where all makers can thrive, be truly themselves and reach their potential.

Q> Who are some of the key members of your team that our readers should know?

All our Girl&Bear’ers are vital members of our team, but to narrow it down a little here’s some of our folk to get you started - 

Claire Young - MD and Power woman.

Brett Kelsey - Head of Post Production

Olly Calverley - Head of Film & Content

Jordan Blood - Head of Design

Caitlin Bavin - Group Head of New Busines

Jon Dewart - Head of Integrated Creative Production

Q> How do you foster creativity within your team?

Creativity is inherent in everything we do! 

Creative ideas cannot come to life without the creativity of the people who know how to make things!

So much creativity goes into the problem-solving that production challenges bring.  And because there are now so many channels and formats - the demands on our making teams are greater than ever, our makers are always flexing their creative muscles. 

Q> How does your company address sustainability, and diversity and Inclusion internally?

It’s important to Girl&Bear that all of our makers can be conscious makers and that we can collectively work together to break down industry barriers. Girl&Bear’s ‘Be Nice’ Policy was created to help everyone accomplish this and places environmental impact and DE&I at the heart of our business. 

Q> What are some of the most interesting projects that your company has worked on in the past year?

Oh man, that’s a hard question to answer as so many of our projects mean so much to us!

Here’s a few, but if you come and visit us on the beach we can tell you about a whole load more! 

XO Bikes! We worked withXO Bikes, which is a charity that creates businesses specifically to inspire, train and employ prison leavers, to deliver some really beautiful hard-hitting work. It was a a particularly interesting project for our designers as it hit multiple disciplines: 2D layout, 3D, typography, retouching and animation.

Cadbury Fingers - Sign with Fingers Big & Small is another one. This is a fully integrated campaign that pretty much hit every specialism in Girl&Bear. It was creatively smart, executed brilliantly and it was thought provoking. All the things that make a campaign very memorable.  

Kew Gardens - Another piece of work created by Girl&Bear from start to finish with a budget on the lower end of the scale. Beautifully shot, graded and edited with our homegrown talent, a wonderful execution.

This piece of work fully epitomises what Girl&Bear is here for;craft without compromise. It is also a refreshing take on the rather bleak topic around Climate Change.

Finally we loved working on the new  Tango spots - Blackberry Tango. At the heart of the campaign is a 60 second film made by Girl&Bear which helped Tango signal a return to the daring and bold adverts of Tango from the 90s and 2000s. 

Q> What are some of the biggest challenges that your company has faced?

In creating Girl&Bear only two years ago, we’ve created a new business (which we planned during the pandemic), a new brand, and we’ve brought a lot of people together to believe in our vision and embrace our ambitious journey of modernising the world of production. 

Creating Girl&Bear was a big change for a lot of our makers, and naturally change can be quite hard to adjust to. Change doesn’t come without its challenges and lessons, however as a team we have worked together to overcome any demands that have come our way, and we’re a stronger team as a result of the lessons we’ve learnt. We can’t wait to see what the next few years brings!

Q> What are some of the most important lessons that you have learned while running your company?

Your people and a good culture is everything! So look after them and it at all times!

I honestly believe the health of your businesses culture can make or break a team.

We have a happy and successful business thanks largely to our brilliant people and the passion they put into Girl&Bear, therefore nurturing our Girl&Bear culture and enabling our people to thrive in a positive environment is a big focus for us.

Q> How do you ensure that your company stays competitive in 2023?

Girl&Bear is constantly evolving and developing new ways to tackle making,  always on our toes we have an open attitude to pulling together exciting production approaches. Girl&Bear is about always being fresh and not doing the same things in the same way - our brilliant people, new technologies, innovative production approaches help us to constantly evolve and innovate.

Q> How has your company adapted to changes in the industry over the past couple of years?

That’s why we created Girl&Bear - to elevate VCCP’s making capabilities and ensure we are at the forefront of delivering modern production solutions whatever the challenge! We share VCCP’s challenger spirit, so have a very positive mindset that there is nothing we cannot navigate with the right talent and right consideration to the changes at hand.

Q> What are some of the most exciting new developments that have taken place at your company recently?

Gril&Bear is constantly evolving but we also get to reinvent production and making alongside our friends in the group, the most recent and exciting development is Girl&Bear active involvement in our new Venture faith - created in May 2023 - to ensure that we are using AI responsibly, and as an unparallelled accelerator of human creativity and imagination. faith is a dedicated agency to advance Generative AI’s creative applications, accelerate our collective learning and share it quickly with our clients.

Q> What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the advertising industry in 2023?

I think one of the most exciting challenges to date is generative AI, and how we use it as an industry to accelerate efficiency and aid creativity. We’re really excited to have recently launched faith, our Creative AI agency, which will produce work for new and existing clients. Through a pioneering partnership with two universities it will also act as an explorative R&D hub. We believe that Generative AI is an unparallelled accelerator of human creativity and imagination and we’re excited to have launched with Sage as our founding client. 

Q> Looking forward, what are your key goals and ambitions for the year ahead?

Keep making, keep feeding my passion for making in new and interesting ways that offer our clients great craft and great value, and have fun whilst we’re doing it!