Native Foreign: A Cross-Cultural Woman-Owned Agency Daring to Be Different

With Emmy-grade creative directors, designers and animators, Native Foreign, a woman-owned creative agency and production company, prides itself on telling authentic stories elevated by design.

Serving clients such as Netflix, Chevy, Subway, Topgolf, Camping World, and Storyline Online - the very first project for which the company was also Emmy nominated - Native Foreign found itself firmly on the map, going on to receive several more awards including Clios, Tellys, ADDYs and more.

In 2023, the team collaborated on an exciting project with writer/director Chad Nelson for OpenAI’s first-of-its-kind AI-powered animated film. Fully designed using AI-generated visuals with DALL-E, Critterz features a range of cute characters in an animated science documentary turned comedy. The film has been widely covered in the press and recently had screenings and panels at Annecy Animation Film Festival, Tribeca X (part of Tribeca Film Festival), and Cannes Lions.

Working soup-to-nuts and challenging the old, inefficient, expensive models of the past, the Los Angeles based agency offers efficient premium solutions at a fraction of the cost. 

Founder and executive producer, Rebecca Hamm champions the hybrid, multi-disciplinary model: “So many times, clients spend millions paying an agency to come up with the creative and then that same agency hires a production company to execute said creative. Those days are over! You don’t need two different companies to execute one idea. In fact, having a hybrid agency partner ensures the vision is aligned from start to finish. For example: we come up with the idea, put it in a script, plan it, shoot it, edit it and finish it. That used to take four to five companies, now it only takes one. We cut out the middlemen and the client saves big time.”

An award-winning creative director with an entrepreneurial spirit, Rebecca spent ten years in the agency world when she decided enough was enough. “I saw a lack of diversity as well as a gap in mid-range budget-level projects,” she tells LBB. “I wanted to create a space for women and minorities, specifically in the creative arena, that reflected the changing world we are living in. On top of that, digital cameras and cheap software allowed anyone out of school to start a company. On the other end of the spectrum, we had multi-million-dollar agencies overcharging clients.”

So in 2018, she made the decision to start Native Foreign with just one client. “My background is really in grass-roots production. My first job in Hollywood was in casting for MTV and from there I went on to do several independent films which taught me how to scale the heavy-handed and expensive production models you typically find in commercial advertising. After creating the SCALED approach to production, giving clients more for less, we were able to build quick momentum and form a team of rockstars whose vision was aligned with ours,” she reflects.

Rebecca is joined by Emmy-grade storyteller and chief creative officer Nik Kleverov. Of Ukrainian and Russian origin, Nik came to the US as an immigrant at the age of three. “My father was a famous nonconformist Soviet artist, and our home was filled with art. Despite growing up in America, I grew up in a very non-American household, so I had some pop culture gaps for quite a while,” he recalls. “I knew I was a foreigner. That’s actually where we got the name ‘Native Foreign’ - myself from a foreign country and Rebecca a native to this land.”

Before Native Foreign, Nik spent years as a creative director at Digital Kitchen, Bungie, yU+co, and other famed design shops. He also had a brief music career in the rap and hip-hop scene in Los Angeles. “I’m still passionate about music and I love when we get to incorporate music into our branded projects. I think that gives us a unique edge with our clients as we understand both vernaculars and how the interplay of music and visuals work in harmony,” he says.

With a passion for diverse and unique perspectives, Native Foreign has an open and collaborative style of working. “For example, when we are pitching on a main title, we will have artists from various creative backgrounds present ideas to the client that range from a ‘vintage toon version’ to a ‘decoupage version’ - we want the client to have options early in the process and to get their creative juices flowing!” Rebecca describes. “We pride ourselves most on this process. We like sharing ideas back and forth. No longer are the days of working in silos. We love working cross-collaboratively.”

And their offering is just as diverse. “Our positioning statement to elevate our client stories with design,” Nik notes: “we’ve done a lot of brand anthems and have also used our design background to work on logos and experiential design for brand refreshes and launches. But we’ve also  done VFX for several music videos, most notably Romeo and Justin Timberlake’s single ‘Sin Fin’ and Young Thug’s ‘Tick Tock’. And we’ve recently crossed into international territories, collaborating with Swizz Beatz’s company Good Intentions to create an original song and graphics-heavy video for the big fight night in Saudi Arabia: Usyk vs Joshua II. We are really looking forward to doing more things like that and working with the international creative community.”

Tapping into Nik’s musical background, in 2022, the team delivered ‘$5 a Day’ for Camping World, including a catchy jingle. “Tapping into the 90’s and early 2000’s style of advertising, Nik came up with a loosely sketched-out rap song and performed it during the pitch and the client was sold!” Rebecca says. “We had a professional Abe Lincoln impersonator flown in for the spot. Everyone got the jingle stuck in their head by the end of the day, so we knew it would be a hit.”

On what keeps their portfolio expanding and their clients coming back for more, Rebecca states: “Any brand that comes to us can expect to have a superior product at a very competitive price. They can expect a streamlined process, with multiple touch points throughout the process. Lastly, they can expect to work with a team that is truly engrossed in the work. We love what we do and I think that really comes through in the product.”

Looking to the future, she says, “Now that we have our existing SCALED method in place, we are focused on expansion. This year we are looking to onboard more employees and take on new and exciting projects while servicing the needs of our existing clients. We have been very lucky that most of our clients are referrals or repeat customers. We really want to continue to expand our client roster and onboard a new host of talent to support those needs.”

For Nik, it’s international borders and new arenas on the horizon: “We’re hoping to venture into more international work that takes advantage of our bilingual capabilities as well as our backgrounds. We’re also really excited by new engaging technologies like AI tools that allow us to all do our jobs better and our unique partnerships with creatives and technologists in this space.”

“We’re actually getting so much inbound that we recently started Native Foreign AI Labs. Our medium is constantly evolving and it’s all about embracing new forms of technology and finding new ways to incorporate these enhancements to evolve our existing production and creative pipelines. We are embracing this change and discovering ways to use emerging tech to lighten the workload of our team.”