The founders of pioneering digital agency Magnetic North are creating world-changing products. Michael Taylor learns all about Beep Industries
On a normal working day, business partners Lou Cordwell and Brendan Dawes get on crowded commuter trains and head into Manchester to lead a group of incredibly creative people. Cordwell waves her family goodbye in Yorkshire, and catches a train – Dawes does the same in Southport. By the time they’ve listened to some inspiring podcasts, followed various social networks and jotted down some thoughts into an uber trendy Field Notes pocket book, they are ready to do their thing.
For the past 11 years their business has been digital agency Magnetic North, responsible for some of the best websites around – their work for the BBC on the Radio 4 Desert Island Discs archive has been much hailed. But they’ve passed that on now.
“We’re putting Magnetic North in the hands of people who know what they’re doing. Those guys are the living embodiment of the company and have worked towards this alongside us for 18 months,” says Cordwell.
“We might find they want to do things differently – they’ve already done their own pitches. They are the delivery team on Desert Islands Discs and work directly with the BBC. They want the licence to do it their way and we have given them that freedom,” she adds.
Cordwell and Dawes are now creating products, via a new start-up called Beep. In those days spent gazing out of train windows Dawes has been thinking about new ideas. Some start as sketches and stay as sketches. Others come out of practical frustration – how can you make your iPhone stand up straight so you can watch a video? What if you could gather pictures, sounds, clips and presentations together in an intimate packaged form – the way we used to give our friends mix tapes of music when we were kids? Hence the MoviePeg and the Mixa products were born.
Dawes says: “We had all these ideas and we thought why wait for clients come up with them? As you get older you start to think about doing stuff that means stuff. It’s not to negate what Magnetic North does; the Desert Island Discs site was the single most important piece of work we’ve ever done in 11 years. It was described as a cultural gem by people on the internet. But we want to leave our mark physically as well as digitally.
“We see problems that need to be solved and we think ‘we can do that’ and we needed an outlet. It’s not a hobby; forming Beep is a strong signal that we are serious about this.”
Cordwell is also keen to stress that it’s not a sideline in branded goods: “A lot of agencies have these little side hobbies doing cups and tea towels. And people say they like these cute things we do, but we’re serious. We are honing our craft doing this.
“For me it’s two things: control, because I am a control freak, and it’s a challenge. You have your own brands and you define the rules and the way they operate. We set out ten years ago to create a digital creative agency that produces world-class amazing work. We’ve done that and I’m immensely proud of it. This is an entirely new challenge – we’re building on how we create brands and how they establish relationships with consumers and I love that. That’s the adrenaline rush – someone calling to make a big order.”
How these two work together is a fascinating exercise in teamworking, balancing skills and temperaments. “If it was all left to me we wouldn’t have a business,” laughs Dawes. “Lou has all the business acumen, the ideas about brands and the strategy. It works as a partnership – we’re super creative, but it works. We basically respect one another. We’ve had huge fallouts; that’s part of the process but it’s nothing personal or anything,” he says.
Beep is run on start-up lines and though it’s based in the same premises as Magnetic North, its whole ethos is independent, small and innovative. “Beep is just four people at the moment and we want to keep it tight like that. We use Twitter a lot; we try and keep a very personal relationship with customers,” says Cordwell. She’s as fascinated by business models as she is with the gadgetry. She’s exploring new ways of distribution and promotion and even open source fundraising.
The newest product from the Beep stable is Red Pop, a device that adds a visible controllable red button to an iPhone and turns it into a camera, rather than the slightly clunky touchscreen style, or even the volume button as Apple will do on the next version.
Red Pop was so named as a tribute to Dawes’ father John, a flame haired sports photographer of some repute. Their calling card is the pitch video to a US fundraising website Kickstarter, from which they successfully raised $48,000 from small-scale enthusiasts. Some may get overexcited that this is a new model in financing start-ups, but it was effectively a smart way to get advanced orders and oodles of publicity with the early technology adopters and opinion formers.
Dawes says he got an incredible lift from the experience: “When it went live and the pledges started flying in I was actually on a plane. When I landed, there I was like Alan Partridge in this Austrian hotel lobby getting a wifi signal to try and watch what interest there would be on Kickstarter.”
And as well as sketches and ideas, he’s also been using his latest toy – a $1,000 3D printer that can “print” a plastic model in his dining room. “You design stuff in Google Sketch Up, then print it out. Out pops a product. This might well blow your mind.”
But Cordwell is also looking to fund this business properly; to fund production, to get the products licensed and distributed and to form commercial alliances in Japan, the US and Europe. “The investors approaching us like the fact we’re just four people and we’re makers of things, but we happen to understand commerciality and brands. We’re breaking the traditional rules of how we get things to market.”
Also in: August 2011
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