The three founders of CreateFuture - Dave, Jessica and Nathan - go way back.

We cut our teeth helping to grow one of Scotland's largest digital agencies. Over time we were spread to the wind - Nathan in an Innovation role with a respected brand agency, Dave leading a 40-strong team of designers in London and Jessica in an MD role with a leading service and experience design company. 

But we kept in touch, and we kept discussing our shared frustrations with aspects of the client / agency model. Designers and thinkers being kept at arm's length from the problems they were trying to solve. Waterfall practices slowing down the delivery of value and resulting in watered down results. And neither clients or teams seemed to be having much, well, fun. 

In late 2016 we decided that, if we were to attempt to fix these issues, then a completely new kind of consultancy was needed, built from the ground up to be fun, fast and collaborative - values we live by to this day. If we wanted to change the future, we'd need to create it. In Jessica's converted garage in Edinburgh's South Side, CreateFuture was born.

Our vision was to combine our deep knowledge of brand, creativity, digital and experience design with the highest levels of genuine client partnership, and underpin our work with the principles and practices of design thinking. While design thinking has been evolving as an approach since the 70's, its application to brand, marketing and proposition challenges was less established. 

We won our first client in our first week - Hymans Robertson. They took a chance on a small team who stood in front of them and said 'We don't know the answer'. We offered instead an approach that, if taken together, would deliver better, customer-centered, validated results, faster than anyone else who was pitching to them that day.  We are still close to Hymans Robertson today.

In our first two years we added M&G Prudential, adidas, Penguin Random House and Expedia, honing our methodology delivering a wide range of proposition and experience design work. In 2018 we made our first full time hire, Gareth Anderson (still with us, now Strategy Lead).

Moving from Jessica's granny flat, first to Queen Street and then Pitt Street in Leith, we were able to bring more designers, creative and strategic thinkers and project managers into the team. We started to do more international work, with The Macallan in Singapore, SCUF in Atlanta, Zoetis in Poland and Chubb Insurance in Madrid...

We were half way through a design sprint (with Hymans Robertson, coincidentally), when the Covid lockdowns hit. Our approaches were designed to be delivered in the same room as our clients; pivoting to fully remote partnership was a design challenge we relished (thank heavens for Miro), and over those two weird years we nearly doubled in size. 

It was during lockdown that another integral part of CreateFuture's purpose became clearer. We had always wanted to create an environment that treated people well and supported their growth, but the pandemic helped highlight just how important this was to us, not just personally but as a business. Healthy, happy people do better work. That has become a mantra at CreateFuture. It's shaped our investment in our culture, environment, working practices and employment benefits, and it's as important for us to nurture not just our own teams, but the teams that we work with.

It was around this time that we started the journey to becoming a BCorp, something we achieved in 2022. It's a community that we are proud to be a part of. 

In September 2022 we delivered our first full-day conference, Catalyst, which brought together 50 leaders of innovation and design teams from across the UK for a day of inspiring and practical talks and intimate round tables.

We still work with many of our early clients, but have added the likes of NatWest, Bowmore, RGAX, Evelyn Partners and Tesco Bank. We continue to invest in our own approaches, growing our research and design definition capabilities.

7 years on, our mission and values remain the same: to create the future, and sustainably grow our client's businesses while improving the lives of our teams, our clients and the communities we work in.

And to do it in a fun, fast and collaborative way.

As of April 2023, we’re excited to start a new chapter as part of the xDesign group. We have officially joined forces. Together we offer end-to-end digital delivery capabilities across business, product and service design. Someone famously said "If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.”

Which is exactly what we did 🚀

Here’s to the next 7 years….