Tevis Houston was running in-house creative at action sports brand Quiksilver when she kept hitting the same wall. The work needed expertise her team didn't have and couldn't justify keeping on payroll, so she started bringing in small specialist crews from outside, briefing them and steering the work herself. It went faster and further than the in-house team could manage alone. 'We'd run these large creative teams and there was a lot of stress as technology came around,' Houston recalls. 'The last team I ran was a small startup within a big brand, and we ended up hiring small teams outside the building.'
When Quiksilver cut her division, other brands started asking her team to do the same for them. What began by accident 13 years ago became Friends Everywhere, formalised three and a half years ago and joined by Mark Min-house with Mattel leading creative across brand, packaging, and consumer products. Houston describes what they built as the team they couldn't find when they were in-house.
That description is worth taking literally, because it explains what a marketer is actually buying. Friends Everywhere is staffed by people who spent their careers on the client side, and the thing they sell is not craft a brand can't produce. It's the knowledge of having sat in the client's chair, and of knowing where the work breaks before anyone briefs them on it.
Understanding what's really burning
Neither Houston nor Michaylira came up through traditional agencies. Both started out at JDK Design, the agency embedded within Burton Snowboards, where the perks included free snowboard setups and days off when it snowed more than a foot. 'It really wasn't a traditional agency,' Houston explains. 'They were so embedded in Burton, they were the team.'
That background shapes how Friends Everywhere operates. 'There's so much institutional knowledge when you spend years in-house,' says Michaylira. 'I know what the day-to-day looks like. There are politics, there are people changes, someone doesn't like green. There are all of these little things that get messy and become barriers to success.' Knowing that those things exist, and knowing they rarely appear in a brief, is a client-side instinct rather than an agency one.
The agency actively qualifies out transactional relationships. 'We want to work with clients that want to do something bigger,' Michaylira explains. 'I came from Mattel and yes, we were selling kids stuff, but everything was rooted in a purpose.' They look for partners who treat creativity as a growth engine. Relationships often start as single projects, with the intention of building and experimenting across years.
Senior talent, embedded approach
Friends Everywhere runs with a team of senior creatives, strategists and operators with decades of experience between them. Their executive creative director came from Vans, while other team members bring experience from Nike and across action sports. When a project needs more hands, they pull specialists from their network rather than padding it with junior staff, and they don't drop the level of seniority to fit a budget.
'We have a really, really strong belief in a human first approach' says Michaylira. 'Craft is table stakes at Friends Everywhere. Everything needs to look good. But we're also really curious. We ask a lot of questions and we don't pretend to know all the answers.'
The team embeds itself inside client organisations. One client told them: 'I don't have to go to meetings because I know you guys are going to handle it.' On an Abercrombie & Fitch project, Michaylira says, the brief came down to trust: as long as Houston was involved, the client didn't feel the need to check the work, because she knew the brand well enough to be right about it. That kind of trust is the embedded model paying off, and it is hard to win from across a table.
From storytelling to systems
Recent creative work shows the agency's range, and the same client-side instinct running through it. For a Levi's and Studio Ghibli collaboration, they went deep into both brands' histories, worked with superfans and built experiences from cinema takeovers to carefully chosen influencer programmes. For Levi's global Pride campaign, they built work across five cities worldwide and made sure every crew member was part of the LGBT+ community. The point in both cases was that the people making the work belonged to the world it was speaking to, which is why the idea travelled rather than sitting on the surface.
Increasingly, though, Friends Everywhere is called in for a different kind of problem. 'When we go in and talk to partners, they're like, the building's really burning down around me,' says Houston. 'We're getting forced to use all this technology.'
What clients frame as content problems often turn out to be structural ones. A recent client complained about seasonal content bottlenecks, but the real issue was briefing processes and departmental silos. 'Everyone's like, we want AI,' Houston explains. 'What we're realising over and over again is they just need certain parts of the process to be figured out.'
When operations becomes creative work
Operations now sits alongside creative and strategy as a core offer rather than replacing either. 'Systems and AI without creative thinking produces nothing worth scaling,' says Michaylira. 'But creative thinking without those systems just can't keep up. They have to work together.'
The work starts with evaluation, mapping current workflows, finding the communication breakdowns, and marking where automation might help against where human creativity is essential. 'You have to have the team in place. You have to have the creative ops in place. You have to have your marketing briefs in place,' says Houston. 'These things are not quick.'
The process is rarely linear. Client work doesn't pause to allow for an audit, so the team is often building a campaign while the evaluation runs alongside it. Houston sees that as an advantage, because it shows them how the internal world actually functions rather than how it is described in a workflow document, and those observations feed back into what they recommend.
One client wanted AI fluency across departments to reach hyper-personalisation, a very different challenge from another client's legacy system problems. 'It's really looking at what's your overall strategy? What is it that we're trying to fix? Let's unlock where we can fix it and let's start small.'
Often the work means fixing fundamentals before any technology is involved. 'Sometimes it's an outside external production team. Maybe it is an AI tool. Maybe it is a nearshore partner,' says Houston. 'But you can't skip the steps and go straight for tools if the foundation isn't strong.'
Hardware and software together
The mix of creative work and operational work is deliberate. 'If we just came in doing marketing ops without an understanding of creative, we're missing part of it,' says Houston. 'And if we come in with creative and just bring big ideas that don't fit into the modern engine, that's not helpful either.'
The approach mirrors how in-house teams actually work. They don't get to separate strategy from execution, or creativity from operations. 'They don't get to just be creative in strategy or just be the marketing engine,' Houston notes. Friends Everywhere can hold both together for the same reason it reads the politics and the silos: its people have done the job from the inside.
One mission
Success for Friends Everywhere shows up as longevity, some client relationships running seven or eight years across many projects, rather than as awards. 'I'm actually really proud that they trust that we're not coming in with ulterior motives,' Houston says. There is a tension in that trust she is aware of. When a client says they no longer have to sit in meetings because Friends Everywhere will handle it, that is the model working and also a kind of dependence. The agency's bet is that the dependence is earned, because the people doing the work have done the client's job, and know the difference between what a brief asks for and what the building actually needs.
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