20 Years. A brief history.
We’ve documented some of the highlights and key moments of our journey from the past two decades. We haven’t always been great at documenting our story with photos of the team (we’re all a bit camera-shy), but we found a few old images from the archives for your amusement (looking back at our old work was embarrassing enough).
2003
The Media Collective was founded on the 25th June by Matt Wattis who had the vision to set up a creative company for some future purpose. He starts looking for a partner to run the day-to-day operations. At the same time, Jez Currin has set up as a freelance designer and starts to build up a local client-base.
2004
Jez Currin (inset) teams up with Matt. He had been doing freelance graphic design work around some property development but takes the reins at The Media Collective to help build the business. The work involves designing a lot of conference marketing and event collateral at this stage (or anything that we can get paid for that ticks the box of being creative or media-based), including creating and selling limited edition art prints into offices. Jez starts working in the attic of his home before finding a small room in his father-in-law’s farm buildings to work out of.
2005
Jez officially becomes a Company Director in February. TMC invests in large-format print equipment to expand into this sector, and Matt’s brother, Ben Wattis, joins the company in November to help grow this. Matt clears some space in his two-storey garage, and we move the business in. We’re working around gym equipment and storage boxes, but we’re having a blast and carve out a cosy space to work from. From day one, we’re learning how to do a lot in a small area, a lesson that will prove valuable in years to come. TMC is commissioned to design and supply graphics for the National AOG Conference, our largest contract to date.
2006
TMC participated in a local community revitalisation project called The One Project, which mobilised approximately 1000 volunteers to improve a local secondary school. TMC donated simple cut vinyl graphics and installed their first school graphics. We weren’t ready for the response we received from the school, who had never seen anything like it (at the time this wasn’t something that schools were doing) and we were immediately commissioned to provide more designs for other areas across the site. Over the years this first school became one of our most loyal and highest spending clients.
2007
As word spreads, we are referred to another school and win a contract to supply signage at Etone School. In our first project with them we created the infamous phallic door signs as part of our first whole-school wayfinding scheme (we had designed a CNC-cut door sign that looked innocent until students pulled off the vinyl graphics to reveal a highly suggestive shape). Possibly our most embarrassing lesson to date! Andy was hired as a designer to help with the increasing workload. Andy has coding skills, so we started to build websites.
2008
As the year progressed, we hired another designer, Dan. We created The Print Handbook. This resource is designed to help graphic designers by showing lots of ‘mistakes’ and other helpful print experiments so that they can make informed choices when setting up their print designs. Andy developed this as part of an internal project inspired by the idea that Google allowed their staff a certain amount of time to work on ideas beyond client work. The book starts selling online and quickly proves popular. We refresh our branding, introducing a colour we call Pred (pinky red).
2009
The Print Handbook continues to gain traction, selling to over 140 countries. We print another run and plan a second edition. Dan gets married and leaves TMC to help his new wife run their family company. Luke is hired to help with the ever-growing sign and graphic department, and we hired Brett to replace the outgoing Dan. Our clients are mainly corporate, but our school clients are slowly growing.
After a long process that took almost two years, we finally got the green light to renovate a new office and workshop space in Coleshill: The Piggeries. It will be our home for the next decade and more.
2010
We complete the work in January and move into The Piggeries on Southfields Farm, Coleshill. Previously home to 1000 pigs, it now houses our design team and print equipment. This is a definite upgrade from Matt’s garage, and we quickly adapted to having some proper space to work in. We don’t have furniture, so we make a few trips to Ikea and fill the rest of the room with items from our homes. The floor is concrete for the first year, but we love it!
This year, we won a contract to replace the signage across all Warwickshire Fire Stations. Rich is hired as a part-time graphic designer, and Charette joins us part-time to help with admin.
Below: Jez’s three older kids ‘help’ on moving day.
Above: one of our periodic team lunches. Our first at The Piggeries. And yes, we attempted to work in the afternoon.
This was a big year for us as we also started to partner with Operation Orphan by offering pro-bono marketing and design services, starting with their annual report.
2011
We continue to settle into The Piggeries. Our client base widens to include specialist catering contracts, car dealerships and many other businesses. We still aren’t specifically focussing on schools, but this work is slowly gaining momentum, and we are learning many lessons about what schools require. We won a contract to install signs and graphics across three new Grace Academy Schools. We invested in a new printer, upgrading our old solvent printer to a new latex HP 360, which is at least three times faster and more reliable.
2012
Andy moved to Ireland with his wife and continues to work remotely on both client work and The Print Handbook, which is in its second edition now and still selling well worldwide. Luke leaves us and finds work at another sign company. We say ‘goodbye’ to both Brett and Charette. We meet Craig, who does his Year 10 work experience with us, and we spot an emerging talent. He starts to do a few hours after school with us. Corporate work still accounts for 70% of our revenue. We won the contract to design and supply IM Group’s annual review.
Later in the year, we gift Andy The Print Handbook business to run himself as we officially say farewell to him as an employee. We wish him every success building his own thing in Ireland.
2013
This year marks a change as we market more to the education sector. We are enjoying the work we do in school and want to grow this side of the business. We refresh our brand and start positioning ourselves as a school specialist company, reflected in our new website design. We are still offering a wide array of services, from website and digital, large format graphics and signs with most things in between.
To this point, most of our education clients are state schools. Even with the push to more education, we won some exciting work that pushed us out of our comfort zone, including a contract to create POS units for Sony cameras and a pop-up display for the House of Lords, which Jez finished from his hospital bed as he wound up getting a pretty severe infection that shut down his kidneys at the start of the year and caused not a small amount of disruption. We inherited a storage container from one of our projects and used it immediately at The Piggeries.
2014
We hired Craig as a full-time designer. Our education clients continue to grow and now account for nearly 45% of our work. We complete projects for schools and colleges across the country for all phases. We introduced a display board called Inflow, which proved popular.
We also started working with an architecture firm and a nationwide school trust that introduced us to private schools in London and beyond, which helped us learn more about their needs and how we can meet them. We installed graphics at The London Oratory School as part of their new expansion work, a project that taught us many valuable lessons about completing complex projects with a main contractor and architect.
2015
Chris joins us to help Ben with production, and Sarah joins part-time to help with admin. Chloe joins us for a few months to assist with marketing before she is head-hunted by a larger firm. This is a busy year as we continue to focus on growing our education work, helped by a new catalogue to promote our sign and graphic work to the education sector.
As part of our ongoing corporate work, we helped Subaru UK redesign their showroom POS and win a contract to supply UK dealer showrooms. We continued to produce high-quality websites, brochures and branding, although it was clear that the large-format print and signage work we were doing in schools was gaining more traction; our team preferred this work, and it was what we felt we were better at.
Above: we enjoy some downtime after a busy summer schedule with an afternoon of go-karting. Matt thrashes us all.
2016
No new staff are hired this year. We focus on building links with more schools in the private sector and are winning lots of new contracts for internal and external signs and graphics. Around this time, Matt takes a large step back from any day-to-day operations and moves into a more advisory role.
2017
We expanded our team by hiring Vanisha as a designer. We were only advertising for one position but during the interview process, we were attracted to Paul’s illustration skills and offered him a job and his style immediately started to appear in our work.
We create the Wonderwall brand and pivot to creating our own content alongside our ever-increasing education client work. In partnership with Lion FPG and to respond to client requests, we launched a high-quality exercise book that gives schools total control over the cover and inner page designs. We have now worked in over 200 schools, colleges or universities across the UK. Our exhibition at the NEC this year says it all…
We end every year with a Christmas lunch. This is one of the rare times we documented it. Matt must have been behind the camera.
2018
We work hard to develop new Wonderwall designs and launch an entire collection. These unique designs offer schools a more affordable solution for displays that don’t need bespoke design but still need a degree of customisation. Our exercise books continue to sell, although they are not making us any money.
We continue to prioritise education work, and by the end of the year, it represents 76% of all completed projects, helped mainly by our Wonderwall and exercise book sales. We stop offering website development and rationalise our large-format products so that we can focus on work that suits our setup and skill base.
2019
We take steps to strengthen our installation team by hiring Ian and re-hiring Luke to help with our installation work. Unfortunately, Ian left us the same year due to a family situation. To fulfil our commitments, we started using Adrian, who had worked with Luke for several years in his previous job, as a contract fitter to bridge the gap and we are impressed with his knowledge and attitude to the work. This year, we are back exhibiting at the NEC with just our Wonderwall brand.
2020
This year was remembered most for visiting one particular school in The Cotswolds. Unbeknown to us they had just hosted a group of students from Wuhan, China and shortly after returning Luke, then Jez became early victims of COVID-19. In February Ben decides to leave The Media Collective as part of a management buyout. Following the first national lockdown in March, we shuttered the business for several weeks and furloughed our staff. Along with the country, we faced new and difficult challenges almost weekly as we tried to navigate the year.
Schools remain open and have no students for much of the year so once we are allowed to open back up we figure out how to safely deliver projects for schools who see the opportunity to catch up on capital projects and site improvement works. We use the pandemic to transition our last few corporate clients and can now focus entirely on the education sector. By July we had brought all staff back from furlough and were set for a busy but socially distanced summer schedule and beyond.
This is the final year that we sell exercise books. We were never able or willing to scale to the level required for this to be profitable so Lion FPG take this forward on their own so that we can concentrate on our core business.
We will now always remember The Media Collective pre and post-COVID-19. Between the management changes, a refresh of our mission, and the pandemic, this was a seminal year for The Media Collective that set new benchmarks in many areas.
2021
With renewed focus following 2020, we started to rebuild. Always keen to find new ways to improve, we embraced hybrid working and video meetings. With vastly reduced admin and a shift away from print collateral, Vanisha and Sarah left us. The business turned 18 this year (thanks to Luke’s mum for the cake, which commemorated Jez’s first computer and our obsession with completing the daily crossword), and it did feel like it has reached early adulthood as we stepped up across the board to grow nearly 30% from our COVID-19 year.
With larger projects and more revenue from our in-house large-format work, we have outgrown The Piggeries and started looking for expansion options. After nearly 18 months of testing different options, we invested £50k in a new printer and sourced a wallpaper product that will be suitable in school environments that we call Tuffwall.
2022
We lease new office space and keep The Piggeries as our print and production base. We invest another £50k to bring CNC cutting in-house, which allows us to control a crucial part of our process. We also hired three new team members: Serenity helps part-time with marketing, Stephanie comes on board to help with Sales, and Dan joins our production team. We learn how to work effectively across multiple locations (and how not to), how to upgrade a building to three-phase electricity, how to renovate a two-hundred-year-old grain store, how to operate a CNC router and many other valuable lessons that all needed to be learned as part of our growth this year. And all while delivering 18% more projects than 2021.
2023
We’re twenty years on and still loving what we do. Our incredible team as of this moment includes:
Dan Ryan - Production team
Jacob Bromley - Production team
Chris Barber - Print Lead
Luke Baskerville - Installation Lead
Stephanie Satchwell - Sales Co-ordinator
Michael Starkey - Designer
Craig Ryan - Designer
Paul McQuay - Illustrator and designer
Adrian Sharpe - Production Manager
Rich Houghton - Operations Manager
Matt Wattis - co-owner and no. 1 fan
Jez Currin - co-owner and Sales