Meet Tom Lovett

The addition of commerciality to a creative business is a recipe for great success

I landed my first job with the boss of the company saying to me, ‘I can teach you more in six months than you will ever learn in three years at art college, and by the way, I’ll pay you while you are learning!’ I was hooked, and have been loving the creative, design, innovation, and insight industry ever since. That was John Holmes of Holmes & Marchant, a true design and marketing industry pioneer who truly inspired me. I quite quickly worked out that I wasn’t going to be the world’s best graphic designer, but I was good with numbers and quickly found my groove in the commercial, business and people side of creativity, design, and brands. The opportunity to start my own business with some others at the age of 28 was too good to miss and we grew it to be a highly successful packaging design, strategy, and product design business, selling after 16 fun and dynamic years. I then went on to start Brand Potential with my two business partners, a new breed of agency combining insight, innovation, creative and design in one glorious mix.

I’m a big fan of keeping things simple and not using industry jargon or cliches, everyone at Brand Potential knows my dislike for acronyms and abbreviations! Making everything we do accessible to a diverse audience, being open, transparent, truthful and straightforward is the thing I bang on about most. 

40 years later I’m still at it, getting my kicks from seeing our team grow and develop, and how the addition of commerciality to a creative business is a recipe for great success, (my mantra, keep your overheads low and don’t spend money unnecessarily!). The most rewarding and humbling aspect of my role is to find, recruit, invest in, encourage, coach and mentor youngsters in our wonderful, inspiring industry and hope that, like me at the start, they will be ambitious and driven, and fall in love with helping consumer brands grow and our industry to be successful.