Walking into Rothschild & Co, I expected complexity. It's a global financial institution, 4,600 people, multiple divisions, operating across EMEA, carrying 200 years of reputation. Complexity comes with the territory.
What I didn't expect was a creative team that had learned to make itself small.
Not through lack of talent. The talent was there. But the team had been operating as a production function for so long, executing instructions, filling briefs, moving files, that somewhere along the way it had stopped believing it was the expert in the room. Stakeholders would arrive with a problem and a solution already attached. The team would execute the solution. Nobody was asking whether it was the right one.
My job wasn't to disrupt. Rothschild isn't a business that benefits from disruption. It's built on trust, precision and long-term thinking. Any change here has to be earned, not announced.
So I focused on two things.
The first was how we approached the work itself. I work across a genuinely broad set of stakeholders: global advisory, wealth management, private equity, events, HR, brand. Each division has its own audiences, its own sensibility, its own idea of what good looks like. Not everything that comes in needs a full creative solution. A lot of it just needs to move. Part of the job is knowing the difference, finding the brief that actually has something in it, and making sure that one lands properly rather than treating everything the same way.
The second was the team itself. I brought in versatile, craft-led designers with broad skill sets. People who think strategically and execute across different touchpoints, illustration, vector, video, digital, without losing the quality or the idea along the way. Because a business like Rothschild & Co, where clients think seriously about art and culture, deserves creative that reflects that level of care.
When a stakeholder walks in with a question, they're not coming for a service. They're coming because they don't have the answer and we do. We should act like it.
The signal coming back is encouraging. The conversations are going differently. The work is getting better.
I'm building a creative function designed to last, with asset libraries rooted in thinking rather than execution, processes that hold up as the business grows, and a team that improves year on year.
Change here isn't loud. It shouldn't be. But it is intentional.
