Meet Kin: The change makers
Creative agency Kin works with its clients to harness creativity to drive meaningful change. Here, the founders reflect on new ways of collaborating, with both clients and creatives
Kin is a creative company that understands its responsibility in the industry and believes that whoever it works with, creativity and culture can drive social change.
Started in 2019 by Kwame Taylor-Hayford and Sophie Ozoux, the duo have taken different elements from the places they’ve worked with in the past to inform the structure of Kin. “We’ve picked ingredients from each type of organisation. In a consultancy, it’s important to go deep and find that connection to the business. When it comes to an agency, it’s all about creative excellence, and at a startup there’s that entrepreneurial, flexible, ‘test and try’ approach,” explains Ozoux.
“In order to really have a clear, positive impact, it’s important that we come to the table with all these elements to ensure we’re not only smart and in line with business objectives, but we also adapt to the reality of our clients who might not be fully ready,” she continues. “It’s the right way to help people and organisations get their toes into the game and then grow from there.”
Ozoux and Taylor-Hayford met ten years ago in New York, when they were both working at Sid Lee. Ozoux was a partner and had helped open the agency’s Paris office before overseeing the opening of the New York space. Taylor-Hayford was also brought on as a partner, where he led clients on production, experiential and technology initiatives. The pair got on so well that when they left Sid Lee in 2016 – Ozoux going freelance to work with non-profits and social impact companies in Los Angeles, and Taylor-Hayford joining Chobani as managing director to build their in-house creative team – they kept in touch.
“We continued to have conversations about what we wanted to do and what we felt the market was missing. And that’s how, little by little, dinner after dinner, we decided to jump and create our own structure, one that would really embrace creativity and impact at the core,” says Ozoux.
“We felt the real void in the market for a company that was designed to execute creativity at the highest level possible but also designed to drive real, meaningful change in the world, connected to the issues of our time,” adds Taylor-Hayford.
“As agencies, the instinct is to really focus on communication and use that as a lever to help drive brand growth. But what we do at Kin is definitely more significant in terms of how close and how connected we get to the business. This is driven by Sophie and I spending time working at brands and really getting inside the different elements that drive and grow the business.”
Kin has built up a mix of big and small clients, including Uber, Mailchimp, Delta, Ben & Jerry’s, and Allies of America, among others. The pair say they’re open in terms of the clients they work with but selective. What matters most is what the end goal is, and whether they can see themselves be a part of that journey.
We felt the void in the market for a company that was designed to execute creativity at the highest level but also designed to drive real change
“If there’s a sincere decision to marry together business and impact, and some first steps have been taken, then we’re happy to come on board, wherever they are on the journey. Nobody’s perfect when it comes to impact, so what matters to us is where we’re going together, and the good that can be made down the line,” explains Ozoux.
“What we don’t want is to come in and participate in any kind of opportunistic or performative efforts. This is something we try to vet and get a sense of early on. Sometimes it takes some collaboration to really get a sense of people’s true commitment, but sometimes it’s [apparent] early on.”
Previous projects for Kin have included working with Mailchimp on Bloom Season, an online resource and community made for, and by, historically excluded entrepreneurs. The first season aimed to help Black entrepreneurs, and season two, launched in June this year, was created for LGBTQIA+ entrepreneurs. Then there’s Kin’s work with Delta, which resulted in Faces for Travel, a project that has become a long-term commitment to increase diverse representation within travel cultures – from social media to tourism ads, and everything in between.
The significance of these projects is that they’ve been created with the long term in mind; it’s not for a single event or activation, it’s a real commitment to change. Part of being able to do this successfully is Kin’s focus on being flexible and bringing in the right perspectives for the job. This is helped by Kin having “virtual headquarters” pre-pandemic, with Ozoux and Taylor-Hayford working across LA and New York.
They’ve since brought on a core team of eight people, but for each new project they regularly tap into a roster of global talent. “It’s part of our philosophy to bring the right perspective because our clients and causes are so diverse,” says Ozoux. “Bringing in people with the right lived experiences and passion makes the work ten times better, so we’ve consistently employed between 40-60 people each year.”
Initially, they used to get questions about how it worked, but post-pandemic, they’ve found people have come round to their way of thinking. “The vision for us was always to create a structure that would invite the right talent for the right project, and we’d be able to pick them wherever they were – we didn’t want to be limited by geography,” says Ozoux.
While the pair have made sure the team see each other in real life throughout the year, Taylor-Hayford believes it’s more about creating an environment where people feel empowered to share their ideas. “We’re a people business; to be honest, every business is a people business,” he says. “The companies that forget this are the ones that struggle, because if you have your collaborators and employees feeling really great and showing up as their best selves, that’s going to translate into [your] output, and then the impact that it has in the world is going to be multiplied massively by that sort of goodwill.”
Setting out with the mindset of improving the world through their work feels almost necessary in an industry where Ozoux and Taylor-Hayford remain “optimistic realists” in terms of the changes that still need to happen, though they acknowledge that some progress has been made in terms of inclusivity and accessibility. An issue they often run into is related to time. “In multiple ways, progress and change are hard and slow,” says Ozoux. “Finding partners, companies and clients who understand that can be tricky, because we understand that the reality of running a multimillion-dollar company means you’re often held to quarterly objectives.”
This comes with pressure to work fast but mindfully, and to manage expectations. “The other thing is this idea that you can’t do it alone; our clients can’t do it alone either,” says Taylor-Hayford. “A lot of thinking has to go into how it scales, how you get more people involved or engaged, and how you make it easy for others to participate. So we try to spend a lot of time thinking that through.”
For Kin’s own long-term goals, the idea is to continue working with brands and corporations, and to have impact at a larger scale. But it’s also about utilising this pool of global talent they’ve built, which runs from Copenhagen to Mexico and beyond, and start producing their own ideas. “It’s important that we’re not always making things on behalf of others but making things for ourselves as well,” says Taylor-Hayford. “My dream is that ten years from now, you’ll be on the phone with the team that’s leading Kin, and you’ll hear from them with as much enthusiasm and passion for this incredible culture of creative ambition, inclusivity and risk-taking.”
