Ladyship: How two agency founders built a global consultancy on candour and craft

When Rana Brightman and Jemma Campbell met at Moving Brands three years ago, they clicked immediately. Both had spent more than two decades navigating the network agency world – Rana through Omnicom agencies including Wolff Olins and Siegel+Gale, Jemma through WPP agencies Landor and Design Bridge and Partners. Both had reached senior leadership positions. And both had arrived at the same conclusion: the higher you climb inside large network agencies, the further you drift from the work itself.

That insight now shapes who Ladyship is built for: CMOs, founders and leadership teams navigating moments of change where brand decisions need to move in lockstep with wider business ambition, not sit separately from it.

Rana, who served as Head of Strategy at Moving Brands while Jemma led Creative for North America, puts it directly. “The more senior you become, the less time you spend on the craft, the client relationships and the strategic thinking itself. Increasingly, you’re navigating the internal mechanics and financial pressures of an agency rather than applying your expertise where it creates the most value.”

When Moving Brands went into liquidation in the UK and significantly reduced its US team in 2024, most employees focused on finding their next role. Rana and Jemma saw an opportunity to build something intentionally different: a consultancy designed from the ground up for the way modern businesses and senior talent now operate.

From the outset, the ambition was never simply to create another boutique agency. The founders wanted to build a model that could deliver the full breadth of strategic and creative expertise clients would traditionally expect from a major network agency, but without the layers, politics, legacy overheads and operational drag that often come with them.

Building something different

Jemma had been based in New York since 2012. Rana remained in London. Rather than seeing geography as a limitation, they saw the emergence of a more globally connected, post-pandemic working world as an opportunity to rethink how a modern consultancy could operate. Ladyship was built transatlantically through WhatsApp voice notes, late-night video calls and collaborative working sessions, creating a business designed to access the best thinking regardless of location.

Early on, the founders became clear on what would define the consultancy. Clients would have direct access to senior strategic and creative leadership. Teams would be assembled around the needs of each brief rather than around agency hierarchy. Expertise would come first, not utilisation targets or bench management.

That philosophy shaped the operating model. Ladyship maintains a deliberately small core team supported by a trusted network of senior specialists brought together around the specific needs of each engagement. The result is a consultancy able to build bespoke teams for each client challenge while remaining agile, highly experienced and deeply hands-on.

The name Ladyship emerged as both a statement and a filter. While Jemma initially wondered whether it might alienate some people, that became part of the appeal. “It’s a really good signal,” she says. “It tells people straight away we’re not interested in ego or microaggressions. We want to work with people who genuinely value partnership, collaboration and respect.”

Craftsmanship, partnership, leadership

Ladyship defines itself through three core principles.

The first is craftsmanship: delivering senior strategic and creative expertise without the bureaucracy, politics or shareholder pressures that often shape larger agency environments. The founders bootstrapped the business independently, allowing them to focus entirely on the quality of the work and the needs of their clients rather than external growth expectations.

The second is partnership. The consultancy is built around close collaboration with both clients and talent, creating relationships grounded in candour rather than performance theatre. That means listening carefully, asking difficult questions when necessary and being willing to challenge assumptions in pursuit of stronger outcomes.

The third is leadership. With more than forty years of combined experience, Rana and Jemma believe clients increasingly need senior people capable of making confident decisions in complex environments, particularly as organisations navigate AI disruption, shifting customer expectations and increasing pressure on marketing functions to demonstrate commercial impact.

The consultancy’s structure reflects that philosophy. There is no traditional layered hierarchy and no junior-heavy delivery model. Everyone involved in a project is there because their expertise is specifically required for the brief. As Jemma puts it: “Everyone’s the A team from the outset.”

The point is not seniority for its own sake. It is about ensuring clients have direct access to experienced thinkers and practitioners who can make decisions quickly, solve problems collaboratively and move work forward without unnecessary complexity.

Not another yes man

One of Ladyship’s defining characteristics is its willingness to have difficult conversations. The consultancy’s tagline – “Because you don’t need another Yes Man” – reflects a pattern both founders saw repeatedly throughout agency life: teams agreeing with client requests despite privately believing they were the wrong strategic choice, often because internal commercial pressures made pushback feel risky.

For Rana, that approach ultimately serves nobody. “More often than not, it comes back to bite you,” she says. “If we were going to build something different, honesty had to be part of it.”

That philosophy recently shaped the consultancy’s work with AI startup Moonbounce following its Series A funding round. Ladyship had developed the company’s strategic repositioning, renaming and brand foundations, transforming the business from Clavata into Moonbounce. As the client moved into implementation, new questions emerged around how those foundations should evolve into a broader digital experience.

Rather than responding transactionally, Rana and Jemma focused on understanding the underlying uncertainty and helping the leadership team bridge the gap between strategic brand thinking and practical execution. “It’s not about telling someone they’re wrong,” Jemma explains. “It’s about understanding where the reaction is coming from and helping solve the actual problem.”

A different kind of culture

Ladyship’s approach to working culture is equally intentional. The consultancy operates on a four-day week, with Fridays protected across the business wherever possible.

The founders are clear that the policy is not about working less, particularly within a business operating fluidly across time zones. It is about protecting the quality of thinking the consultancy is built on. Senior strategic and creative work requires energy, focus and perspective. The model depends on people staying close to the work itself, which in turn requires space for recovery and recalibration.

Clients are aware of the policy from the beginning. When launches or deadlines require additional flexibility, the team adapts accordingly, but the broader principle remains consistent. Rana says clients quickly recognise the benefits: sharper thinking, more focused collaboration and a more energised team delivering the work.

The culture has also shaped the experience of the people inside the business. Sarah, a project manager who joined Ladyship in late 2025, told Rana after several months that it was the first professional environment she had worked in where she did not feel she needed to apologise for being a mother. For Rana, herself a mother of two, the comment reflected the kind of culture they had hoped to create: ambitious, high-performing and humane at the same time.

Proving the model

Almost two years in, Ladyship has worked with enterprise organisations including Hitachi and GlobalLogic alongside venture-backed startups and founder-led businesses.

Their work with Moonbounce became an early demonstration of the consultancy’s end-to-end strategic and creative model, spanning positioning, naming, identity and activation systems. More broadly, the founders say the consultancy performs best when working closely with leadership teams at moments of transition, helping translate business strategy into coherent brand and creative direction.

That clarity was reinforced during a major enterprise engagement that gradually expanded beyond strategy and brand into broader production and campaign execution workstreams. When the client later restructured its marketing organisation, Ladyship used the moment to reassess where it creates the greatest value.

The outcome ultimately strengthened the relationship. The client significantly reduced its external agency roster while retaining Ladyship as a strategic creative partner focused on upstream brand and business challenges rather than production-heavy delivery. For the founders, the experience reinforced the importance of staying close to the work they believe differentiates the consultancy most clearly: senior strategic and creative thinking delivered directly alongside leadership teams.

A community, not just a consultancy

Jemma describes Ladyship as something broader than a traditional consultancy model. The business operates as a community built around long-term relationships: trusted collaborators, returning clients and senior talent connected through mutual respect, candour and shared standards.

That positioning feels increasingly relevant within a rapidly changing industry landscape. As AI reshapes workflows, organisations compress structures and the role of the CMO continues to evolve, many experienced strategic and creative practitioners are questioning traditional agency models. Ladyship sees an opportunity to reconnect senior expertise directly with client challenges at a time when businesses are being asked to move faster, think more clearly and achieve more with leaner teams.

The consultancy is actively building that network of senior talent further, bringing experienced specialists into flexible, high-trust collaborations designed around the needs of each client engagement.

The founders are equally clear about what they are not trying to do. Ladyship is not interested in scaling for the sake of revenue growth or recreating the operational complexity of the large networks they intentionally left behind. The ambition is to grow selectively while protecting the qualities that make the consultancy effective: direct access to senior leadership, bespoke expert teams, agility, candour and close partnership with clients.

That does not mean Ladyship lacks ambition. The consultancy flexes around the needs of the work, assembling trusted senior specialists with the precise expertise required for each engagement while maintaining the speed and flexibility of a deliberately lean model.

Jemma is direct about what they ultimately want to prove. “We’re hellbent on showing there’s a better way of doing this,” she says. “Less posturing. Less toxicity. More honesty, better collaboration and stronger work. Clients deserve senior people who genuinely care about solving the problem, not protecting layers of process.”

And the model appears to be resonating. Ladyship has grown through repeat engagements, referrals and long-term relationships, building a consultancy that combines senior strategic and creative leadership with the agility of a modern operating model.

For clients, that means direct access to experienced thinkers, bespoke teams assembled around each challenge and a more agile, cost-efficient alternative to traditional agency structures. So far, the answer appears to be yes.