Campfire
Manchester
Website: Campfire
Founders: Alex Brown and Joe Gradwell
Year founded: 2019
UK headcount: 50-99
Offices: Manchester
The answer to ‘what next?’ is all about growth.
Profile
It started as a bit of healthy competition for Alex Brown and Joe Gradwell when they were at social media agency Social Chain in the mid-late 2010s. There, they were responsible for creating large social media communities and getting people to follow them in a magazine subscription-type way. But they didn’t feel brands were using social media ad platforms to target people as effectively as they could, nor were they satisfied with the direction the business was going. So off they went to do it themselves.
Named so for its community-driven, storytelling approach, Campfire launched in 2019 very much as a traditional social media agency. For the first six to eight months, they were offering all the basics – organic social, paid media management, influencer management – and landed a few clients but “struggled to find their feet.”
That was until they met a skincare brand called The Inkey List and started experimenting with a very new and undersaturated TikTok at the time. Fast forward six years and Campfire has certainly found its feet; today, over 60 people are working with the likes of Unilever, Coty and L’Oreal - the latter really helped to put Campfire on the map given agencies have to go through a series of tests to even be on L’Oreal’s books.
The Manchester-based agency has also been building its own software to support brands within the industry, including launching its flagship trend detection tool Spark, and VibeCheck, a real-time sentiment analysis tool. While eschewing Gen-AI, Campfire is working towards becoming an AI-powered business operationally.
2024 saw the agency shift gear, selling part of the business to private equity firm Literacy Capital and establishing a proper board. Since then, decision-making has become more long-term and focused on creating a “compelling” five-year story that will attract investment in future.
Indeed, Campfire has many long-term plans for growth. There are clear opportunities to grow revenue in regions with a rapidly growing beauty market, such as the US, Asia and UAE, and in similar markets such as fashion, interior design and athletic wear. The agency is also scoping out potential acquisitions and partnerships with other agencies with similar ambitions and scale.