Mill Co. have launched their first annual community exhibition at east London’s The Russian Club. The show focuses on work done by Mill Co’s virtual online community, whose members together make up the full service creative agency. Founders Claire Martin and Liz Birkbeck were on hand to ply us with Ketel One vodka cocktails, and we had music by Bad Passion Project as well as a candle lit reading by Mill Co collaborator, Rachel Newsome. Mill Co has talented members such as film maker Colin O’Toole whose work last night consisted of a film entitled Character, which included video footage of singer Ian Brown. Other highlights came in the form of photographer, Jessie Craig’s Untitled From ‘Phantom’ Series – a dirty black-and-white punk girl with an attitude stares out at you with sad eyes. Lisa Stannard’s illustrated silk sheets and Karina Lax’s Untitled misty eyed photography were also beautiful highlights. Dazed spoke to one of the founders of Mill Co, Claire Martin, to find out how this extraordinary company came to be.

Dazed Digital: Where did the idea come from to create Mill Co.?
Claire Martin: We were both born in Rochdale and grew up surrounded by derelict Victorian, cotton mills, reminders of the industrial revolution, creation, community and hard work. During the early 1990s, we both moved to Manchester City Centre and couldn’t help but love and respect the Manchester mills; they always were a love of ours. Rochdale is the birthplace of co-operation and the creator of the very first successful co-operative model. 

I was out in Mexico travelling last year, I’d quit my job as marketing manager for Wrangler and just headed off on my own for a bit of a sabbatical…   I did a yoga teacher training course in Costa Rica, back packed around Nicaragua and Gautemala and really re-evaluated my life. It was during the trip that I realised that I couldn’t go back to my old life in the rat race, bussing it two hours to work in the West End from Hackney and working long hours and not getting any real satisfaction.  Trekking around Central America alone gave me the confidence to try something new and by teaming up with Liz who’d already run her own company for ten years meant that between us we had the skills and the drive to give it our very best shot.

DD: What makes this agency different from the other creative agencies and how can it manage briefs better than traditional forms of agency?
Claire Martin: The beauty of Mill Co is that it is a very modular and flexible business model, we act as a strategic central hub, sourcing and managing each project with a creatively honed brain, experienced in the potentially complex needs of any project.

DD: How does the company function considering that you don’t employ full-time staff? Presumably it makes cueing for the coffee machine a bit easier?
Claire Martin: We never have to worry about queuing for the coffee machine… Or having to beat the rush to the tube, sit in traffic or any of the problems most commuters face. We rely heavily on Skype which works perfectly for us, we even have it on our iPhones too now. We work from home and our space at The Russian Club, friends studios and sometimes our favorite Wi-Fi cafes and often we just leave Skype on whilst we work, then it's just like we are in any other office environment.  We can discuss projects casually, send images for reference and sign off quickly via Skype, check with each other how to spell things, its great! We meet up every couple of weeks and whenever we have a meeting it's just 2.15 on the train now, it can take longer to get from one side of London to the other!

DD: What response has the agency had from creative professionals?
Liz Birkbeck: An outstanding one, we have been so well received but the industry we’ve been a bit taken a back. We expected to come up against some scepticism but haven’t as yet.

DD: What does it mean to have creative professionals such as Joy Division photographer Kevin Cummins and film maker Colin O’Toole working with the agency? And how would they contribute to campaigns?
Claire Martin: It means that as well as nurturing emerging talent we can offer established names once again meaning we have a very complete list of creative service elements to suit every project and budget.

DD: How did you meet your Mill Co. partner Claire Martin and why do you work well together?
Claire Martin:  We met in a trainer shop in Rochdale where we both worked as Saturday girls, we were 15 and we didn’t get paid a wage, we just got £1 commission for each pair we sold so we made our money and passed the time by coming up with hair brained schemes to sell more pairs which included ripping out the size tags and convincing customers that the particular brand came up big or small depending on weather we had the size they wanted or not… The business relationship started from there (joke).  We have grown up together and grown into our industry simultaneously, we share the same core cooperative values so when we found ourselves working on projects together a few years back when Liz was at Bubble and I was at Topshop and Wrangler we started talking about how great it would be to do something together.

DD: How would a creative person get involved with Mill Cooperation?
Claire Martin: We’ve been inundated with people wanting to join our community, it started out as pretty much just a whole load of our very creative friends and a few friends of friends, film makers like Colin O’Tool who I’ve known for years since we worked at Grand Central Records together then just snowballed, I get emails every day from people wanting to join the community because they’ve read about us heard about us through a friend of a friend and we’ve had to turn a lot of people away who are really talented so as not to dilute our offer. The last thing we want to be is a directory of creatives – we are so much more than that, we are a full service agency and in fact way beyond… We don’t have the constraints of that the average agency has as we have not full time employees so we are free to pick and choose who works on each project with us so that we can be sure that each client gets the perfect team tailor made to work on each individual project.

The show will move to the Folk Sales Showroom 17-21 Emerald Street WC1N 3NG from 31st May until the Autumn and limited edition prints of the work are available to purchase from themillshop.millco.co.uk  in aid of millcofoundation.org