Name:
Steve Bellingham

Position:
Managing Director of Rare Creative

When was Rare Creative founded and what do you do?
We are nearing the end of our 11th year of trading. There were originally two partners who founded the business with just one other employee as a design agency but over the years we have expanded that into a full service strategic marketing and creative solutions consultancy. We work primarily in the Business to Business arena, where many of our clients are product brand owners in the construction, renovation and home improvement sectors, selling via builders and plumbers merchants. Another prime sector is education with clients like Sheffield Hallam University and we also work with other public bodies like councils and government departments. In the B2B sector we have large clients as well as SMEs. We support the overall marketing needs of businesses and offer strategic advice as well as designing the marketing communications programmes. Typically these will include targeted awareness programmes such as direct mail as well as literature and online marketing. We currently have 12 members of staff and we have been based in Aizlewood’s Mill for almost ten years.

What attracted you to your current workspace?
The business was founded by people who lived near Doncaster and originally they worked from home. They made a conscious decision that for the company to grow and attract the best clients it needed to be in a larger city so they chose Sheffield. They then looked for a flexible, cost effective location. It needed to have a wide range of office sizes to allow the company to grow and Aizlewood’s Mill matched this. When choosing a location we consider transport links, local infrastructure and the quality level and availability of staff for recruitment.

How important is ICT infrastructure to you?
We manage a lot of our own ICT and recently invested £50,000 in upgrading our network, servers, hardware and software. It is critical for us to have good ICT infrastructure, as we have to store a large amount of electronic files and to offer good connectivity to our clients and suppliers. If we were changing location today we’d prefer to move into somewhere that’s ready and enabled so that the only thing we’d need is to plug into an ISP and we could be up and running.

Is ict active accreditation something you would look out for when choosing a building?
ict active accreditation would certainly make a building more attractive. We would tend to look at other things first if we were changing building such as location and parking as we are often in and out visiting clients. We would also look at the image and the cost. But it would be great if we saw a building that said you don’t need to worry about ICT.