In 2022, I stepped away from my professional practice and entered a period of full-time parenting, reflection, and exploration. After years of working across studios, agencies, and in-house creative teams, I wanted to create room to reconsider my relationship with creative work and the direction I wanted to take next. The change brought a different rhythm to everyday life, with more time for family, long rides, independent research, and questions that had gradually emerged throughout my career.
Much of this period was spent exploring the relationship between creativity, purpose, and societal change. I began questioning the role of the creative industry and the systems it serves, looking at how branding, storytelling, and creative thinking could contribute to organizations working towards a more meaningful future. This research connected earlier experiences in brand building, film, and creative leadership with a growing interest in the wider cultural and social role of creative practice.
These explorations gradually developed into New Creativity, first as an idea and then as an emerging philosophy and practice. Built around the belief that purpose shapes the iconic brands of the future, it proposed a different relationship between strategic thinking, creative expression, and the organizations behind them. Early iterations involved developing its positioning, exploring its visual and verbal identity, shaping its proposition, and considering how the practice could support nonprofits and changemakers.
The development of New Creativity also prompted a broader reflection on how I wanted to structure my own work. Rather than returning to a single organizational or agency model, I began exploring a connected practice that could bring together different disciplines, perspectives, and forms of expression. This thinking eventually extended beyond brand and nonprofit work into leadership, creative collaboration, and fiction.
Looking back, the career break became a formative period in the development of my current practice. It brought personal priorities and professional ambitions into a new relationship, while giving shape to ideas that had previously existed across separate experiences. New Creativity became its first tangible expression, laying the foundation for the wider creative ecosystem that continues to evolve today.
