by Real Business - Thursday, 30th August 2007

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Walk into the London office of The Attik. The first thing you see is a reception desk. Nothing surprising there. Except this one is covered in fake fur. Luminous orange fake fur, to be precise.

Not far away, there's a meeting room. It has the usual TV and video at one end, with a long table, surrounded by chairs. But the chairs are upholstered in leopard-skin fabric. And in the middle of the table there are two recessed boxes. The tops of these boxes are clear Perspex. The sides of the boxes are, yup, orange fake fur. And in the middle of each of these boxes is - a lemon.

Bah, humbug. Typical designer whimsy. Just the sort of thing you'd expect from self-indulgent creative types who don't really understand the demands of proper, grown-up business.

To all this, I would add one piece of information: The Attik doubled its turnover in each of the first 12 years of its existence.

In 1986, a couple of 20-year-old street artists called Simon Needham and James Sommerville, newly graduated from the graphic design course at Batley College, set up their own design business in James's granny's attic - "my grandma fed us a continuous supply of tea and cake (as they do)," says James. The lads had £300 start-up capital, a £1,000 grant from the Prince's Trust, plus £40 a week provided by a government youth employment scheme. Their aim was to make enough money to be able to buy a BMW each after just five years.

It took them three. By 1987, the Prince's Trust had gone from handing out charitable donations to The Attik to giving them contracts for their graphic and print work. Over the next decade or so, they acquired clients such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Kodak, BT, MTV and EMI. They did corporate reports for David Brown Engineering and Yorkshire Electricity, and promotional campaigns for Sega, Warner Bros and Walt Disney. Turnover this year should hit £10m, with tasty 20 per cent post-tax profit margins (see "James mouths off"), but The Attik now has offices in London, New York, San Francisco and Sydney, employing 120 staff, the oldest of whom is 36.

The craggy old corporate sage is David Taylor, managing director of The Attik's Huddersfield office. He, like virtually all the company's senior staff, began life as a designer. He was plucked from a local printer because, in Sommerville's words, "he was the only one that applied for the job." The recruitment technique was pure Attik. "We told him that he was up against 'at least five others' for the job and would he go the extra mile?" Sommerville recalls. "So he shot over for an interview one Saturday morning and he wouldn't stop talking. Thankfully, what he talked about also made sense."

Back then, The Attik was a young, hip design boutique. "We weren't really interested in process or detail," says Sommerville. Six years later, the business has global production systems and a refined new-media strategy. Says Sommerville, "The Attik's work has a reputation for being disorganised, reactive, cluttered, but fairly cool-looking and distinctive. And people think we run our business in the same way. What they don't realise is that underneath all that clutter, there is (I'm sorry to say) solid structure, process, intelligence and straight-minded common sense that runs a business across four time zones around the world."

This is a product-led company, driven by the desire to improve the quality of its work, rather than the requirement to do things as cheaply and quickly as possible. The Attik may have a defined corporate structure and proper accounting systems but, says Taylor, "one of the reasons we've had such incredibly fast growth is that we still act in a very intuitive, spontaneous, gut-reaction way. If we see an opportunity we don't stand around debating it for too long. If it feels right, we do it. The most successful business people in the world - people like Bill Gates or Richard Branson - are gamblers. They chance their arms. So if we present an idea, the job of the financial directors is not to question why we want to do it. It's just a question of, can we afford to do it right now?"

The Attik works as a series of linked communities. Each office has its own local board, whose managing directors are also members of the group board, as are the UK and US financial directors. The offices are all linked by an Intranet system, so that a client who originally contacts The Attik through, say, the Sydney office, may then be serviced by staff from the entire company. "We are probably one of the first truly global creative companies," says Taylor. "I don't tell a client, 'I am from the Huddersfield office.' I'm from The Attik. I represent all five offices."

All over the world there is an Attik "way." "Passion is by far the number one thing that we look for," says Sommerville. "We've usually decided whether someone is right for the job within the first minute of meeting them."

And they go to great lengths to preserve that ethic. When The Attik starts a new overseas office, Attik employees are sent out, like corporate colonists, to establish the company's new beach-head (James is currently in the US; Simon's in Sydney). By the time local staff are hired, the culture is firmly in place.

This is very much the modern international business. Attik people shift around the world. Employees are shared across studios. Teams cross-fertilise. Promotion comes quick. "I know a designer who started with a two-week placement in Huddersfield, then moved to New York and is now in San Francisco," says Taylor.

But money and travel aren't everything. Talented, creative types are driven by a need for self-expression. No amount of pay can compensate for the feeling that your abilities are being constrained and your suggestions ignored. Answer: [noise], The Attik's in-house magazine. Some 10,000 copies are sold around the world at £60 apiece, accompanied by glitzy launch parties in Leeds, London, New York, Paris and other fancy locations.

[noise] is an extraordinary production. The 1997/8 edition contained 160 pages, packaged in a steel container. Inside were the sorts of images that incredibly bright, sleep-deprived, artificially stimulated people can produce when given unlimited access to state-of the-art computers, designer software and printing processes and then told to do - whatever the hell they want. (And, best of all, most of those print, paper and repro suppliers do the work for free, just to show what their fancy new machines can do.)

"Attik designers and production people are living dog-years," says Taylor. "They live seven years to any normal designer's one year and that's because of [noise]. For lots of our designers, that magazine was the main reason they joined. They do it in their own time, at weekends, through the night - never on a client's time. It's a vehicle for experiment and it's an educational process for designers. They've pushed the boundaries of what's possible."

[noise] is also used as a marketing tool to attract new business. But with great care. The images are so intricate, dazzling and, erm, weird that it could easily scare off clients.

Taylor takes a different line. To him, the publication is a way of demonstrating the company's commitment to excellence and innovation. Clients understand that Attik staff won't always provide such hard-core material; they can always step back into the mainstream. "Besides, [noise] is only ever presented to clients as an extreme," says Taylor. "It helps people see that the company isn't stuck, that we move on very quickly. We can always show them the company reports we've done for blue-chip companies if they need to be reassured."

And [noise] does something else, too - as does the orange fur and the crazy meeting table: it gives bored, frustrated corporate types the chance to get close to something sexy. It gives them a little bit of grooviness-by-association. You may be a mid-level brand manager in a monstrous corporation - but while you're hanging out with the gang from The Attik you can kid yourself that there's still an anarchic, rebellious heart beating beneath your Hugo Boss double-breasted.

The Attik, meanwhile, moves onwards and upwards. Last year, it bought Plume, a company providing screen graphics to the film industry. It's all part of a plan to become an all-round creative solutions company, able to give clients a full range of services in media, ranging from print, to video, movies and CD-Rom. New offices around the world are planned, but only when the company perceives a demand for them. As for the clients, says Taylor, "we don't work for anyone we don't want to work for. We target our clients very carefully. We research them and we endeavour to get under their skin and become part of them."

The entire Attik approach is geared to the idea that there are no challenges that cannot be met, no problems that cannot be turned into opportunities. "There are corporate goals," says Taylor, "but they're amended continually, generally because we achieve them so quickly."

If you think that sounds cocky, wait till you hear the corporate mission-statement, which reads: "Everything we do is innovative, confident, international, cool."

It was chosen after one of The Attik's regular staff get-togethers. The entire team gathered in Stratford-upon-Avon and everyone was divided into groups. One of the groups had to come up with words that summed up The Attik. These were then presented to the entire staff. The full list was then whittled down to four.

Why not use these as the basis of a mission statement, suggested Sommerville. That way, the staff could see that they were defining the company's destiny. In fact, why not go even further? "The best way to let them see that they were The Attik was to give them the four words back, completely untouched," says Taylor. "We will be all these things - innovative, confident, international, cool."

But that wasn't the only development to come out of that meeting. The staff also set a five-year plan. "We completed it in two years, because it was everybody's plan. It wasn't just a few people dragging everyone else along with them - it was 120 staff, all driving in the same direction. And what's going to stop that? Not a lot."

James mouths of
Spend any time with James Sommerville and Simon Needham, and it becomes clear they are used to being the centre of attention. James tries manfully to restrain his colleague's wilder excesses. But half-way through a Simon tale about disrupting a design show by setting up a huge sound system and blasting out their rivals, James knows he's beat. Here are James's very distinctive views on the world.

On keeping your company's personality:
"Even though business is now operated globally through e-communication, we still operate in a 'people world'. When it gets down to it, you can do the 'coolest shit' in the creative world, but if you've no personality and people find you difficult to deal with, you'll lose clients. It happens all the time."

On Huddersfield:
"When it comes down to it, we are all from the north of England. I'm from Huddersfield and I'll never forget that. That's the essence of our brand, our personality and the core of the company. And, strange as it may seem, it's a huge talking point and sales tool outside the UK."

On the future:
"Yes, things will change at The Attik. We shed our skin naturally every six months anyway, and as we step closer towards our virtual master plan, you'll see things develop in ways that you won't expect. Maybe you'll be staying in an Attik hotel, watching an Attik feature film on our HDTV or browsing an Attik portal online in the very near future...

"My prediction is that we'll thrive in film. Film-making is undergoing dramatic change. In the same way that the Internet is turning retail and travel businesses on their heads, so film and commercial-making is starting to metamorphose. Celluloid is expensive; the Internet is cheap. As bandwidth becomes more available and less expensive and with the explosion of streaming media, digital distribution is upon us."

On favourite places:
"At my local Huddersfield amateur team, playing football in the pouring rain. It's 2-2, nearly dark, there's ten minutes left and it could go either way. Outside of that, I'd have to say New York. It's without doubt the most inspiring place in the world, whether it's 7am and I'm running through the mist of Central Park or strolling through the back alleys downtown."'

Contacts
David Thomas has edited three magazines, all of which subsequently folded. Contact him at dwpthomas@aol.com

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