About — Fair Folk

In Fair We Trust

We founded Fair Folk on one simple principle most of us were told as kids - treat people the way you want to be treated. It wasn’t meant to be a business tactic, but as it turns out, it’s not a bad way to run a business. Over the last eight years, we’ve bent over backwards for our clients, and it just so happens they’ll jump through hoops for us too. That’s because we enjoy forming relationships, building partnerships, and getting to know the brands and people we work with.

While we're a small team, we've been fortunate enough to have done some big work – growing brands from nothing to, well, something. For example, we started with Athletic Brewing Co. before they brewed a single non-alcoholic beer (now they're brewing 60 million/year), or even had a name (we named them, by the way). Yes, the same Athletic that was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential Companies, Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies, and Financial Time's fastest growing companies. We also launched New Balance into lacrosse, Hydrow into home fitness, Trillium into craft beer, and Lume into cannabis.

An un-agency agency? We actually can’t even take credit for the term. It came from the mouths of different clients over the years, using it to describe us. And we found it quite fitting.
So what is it? We can start with what it’s not. After all, we arrived at our un-agency agency model through years of experiencing what wasn’t working.
It’s not a cut-throat environment of internal teams competing against each other. Because that isn’t healthy – for the people or the work. It’s also not clients talking to go-betweens. Because that isn’t a very effective or efficient way of communicating.
It is a working environment that fosters internal collaboration over competition. Meaning work is regularly moving between people and teams – being constantly infused with new ideas and perspectives. And we believe the work is far better because of it.
It is direct communication. We’re a small team of designers, copywriters, photographers, directors, producers, and editors. But those same folks are also our account supervisors, project managers, and client coordinators. Why? Because we believe the more distance put between clients and the people creating the work, the more the work suffers. So we built a model with no middlemen and no translation being lost in games of telephone. Our clients talk with the people who are actually doing the work. It’s a model we’ve built upon slowly, because it takes the right people. Which is why our biggest pride is just that – our team of talented, personable, hardworking, and compassionate people.
Being a small shop full of passionate folks, we naturally have an affinity for working with small start-up brands with passionate teams – which has led us to interesting opportunities, like doing work in exchange for anything from equity to sandwiches – yes, sandwiches (really good sandwiches though). But maybe even more interesting is that none of this work is done without getting sign off from our entire team. That's right, we don't take on any new business that our entire team doesn't vote to take on - regardless of how big (or small) the payout might be. Why? Because we want our team to be doing work they actually want to do. Again, why? Well, honestly, because we love them.
All sounds pretty un-agency-like doesn’t it? Still want to know more? Okay, we should probably take this to the next level: Drop us a note.