We run the kind of agency that usually only exists in London. Our client list spans national brands, luxury fashion houses and household names; our work has kept us in the world's top 100 for performance marketing three years running; and we write a regular column for The Drum, one of the UK's biggest marketing publications.
For most of our careers, doing work at that level meant being in London — because that's where the industry lives, and it's where young people from towns like this one have always had to move to get their start.
After the pandemic, we moved to the seaside — and like so many people who arrive here, we fell in love with the town (and firmly out of love with the commute). Rather than treating Hastings as somewhere to live between London meetings, we decided to invest in it properly.
We took on an old Victorian stables at St Andrews Mews, in the heart of the creative quarter, and renovated it into a London-standard professional creative studio: a photography and content space that this town didn't have before.
Alongside our national client work, we train T Level students here — young people from East Sussex learning marketing, business and creative production the way we were trained, on real client accounts, with real accountability, without having to leave home to do it.
That's the opportunity we're trying to create. The kind that usually doesn't exist outside London. The kind we had to move away for.
Our local retainers are priced at £400 a month because they serve two purposes at once. Local businesses get London agency-quality marketing at a price that actually makes sense for them, and every retainer directly funds a training place for a young person from this town.
Your account is where our students learn — always under our direct supervision. We set the strategy. We review the work. We stay accountable for the results.
What you get is senior thinking delivered by people we're training to our award-winning standard, and what the town gets is a generation of marketers who didn't have to leave to build a career. Every retainer keeps money, skills and talent circulating in East Sussex — a stronger local economy that every business here, yours included, gets to trade in.
Sian is a brand strategist with more than 20 years' experience in marketing. She writes a regular column for The Drum, one of the UK's leading marketing publications, is the author of Buy Better, Consume Less (Icon Books), and was ranked 54th on this year's Performance Marketing World Power 100 — the list of the top 100 people in performance marketing in the world. A former Government Green Ambassador, her client work spans premium fashion, food and drink brands across the UK and internationally.
Andrew is a behavioural economist with a doctorate from Cambridge and more than 20 years' experience in communications and advertising. His career spans government crisis communications, political campaigning for notable figures worldwide including Barack Obama — and last year he was ranked the 17th best digital advertiser in the world. He applies the science of how people actually make decisions to brand and marketing strategy, and brings the same rigour to a Hastings café's Instagram as he did to a presidential campaign.
Together we run 181st Street, a brand development agency working with premium consumer brands, and The Studio Hastings, our photography studio and training base at St Andrews Mews in the creative quarter.
Great marketing shouldn't be something only London businesses can afford. Creative careers shouldn't be something only London can offer. A town full of independent shops, cafés, venues and makers deserves the same standard of thinking as any national brand — and its young people deserve the chance to learn how it's done, without leaving.