South Shields design agency Urban River Creative splashes out with expansion plans

Feb 25 2010 by Karen Dent, The Journal

A CREATIVE design agency has almost doubled its workforce and moved into new offices as its starts to increase its focus on the digital side of the business.

And Urban River Creative says its expansion may continue through acquisition if the right business becomes available.

The South Shields-based company has moved into bigger premises in King Street, seven years after it launched.

Managing director Carl Buckley said: “Last September, we made the decision we could tick along or we could try and move things on.

“We needed to potentially look at new premises and that slotted into place. Within three weeks, we’d recruited three new staff and moved into an office five times the size.”

The decision was fuelled by the increasing about of digital work coming into the agency, which works both on and offline.

“We have expanded to seven people. We fluctuated a bit but we recruited three new members of staff at the end of the year, which is quite unusual,” said Mr Buckley.

“We wanted to widen our general resource capability – we had a growing requirement on the digital side. We’d always been 50/50, but the way the market was going, we needed to bring in two people to bolster that [digital side] because we do both the design and programming in house.

“We do punch well above our weight.”