Entering its 12th year and exiting a global pandemic, a North East creative agency is set to have its best financial year ever, with sales on track to surpass its yearly target by 72.5 per cent. It has also grown its team by a quarter to meet client demand.
Cargo Creative, based in North Shields, has thrived in the past 12 months, despite the market almost halting last summer. Its previous milestone year came in 2018 but this year has beaten that by 20 per cent.
The company, founded by Paul Hart, thanks its success to its resilient and loyal team and varied client portfolio.
He explains: “We’ve never wanted to specialise in a certain sector. The whole team comes from a range of backgrounds and industries so we wanted to utilise all of their experience rather than go after one. That’s helped massively during the pandemic as we weren’t faced with multiple clients needing to cut back on activity – if anything they needed our support more.
“We have seen a surge in new work across a range of businesses both in and outside of the region as well as working with several health and lifestyle businesses in the US which are new areas for us to sink our teeth into.
“In addition, in order to answer the needs of our clients we have grown our team to offer a full range of services from brand creation, digital design and development and online marketing to ensure that they are fully supported on an ongoing basis. This further strengthens our long-standing client relationships.
“Some of our team have been with us since we started over a decade ago and it’s undoubtedly down to their loyalty and relationships with clients that we’ve not only survived but thrived in these unprecedented times.”
Cargo Creative is a digital, design, and online marketing agency working with brands such as; Ward Hadaway, Filtronic, Perspective Financial Group and Northern Powergrid.
James Sykes, head of business development at Ward Hadaway said: “We have worked with Paul and the team for several years now and have been impressed time and time again with their creativity, professionalism and ability to deliver quality work.
“As an example, when Covid hit, we wanted to help support the wider business community in the region. We tasked Cargo with creating an online Covid hub containing a growing library of specialist advice from our firm to help businesses through the pandemic. They did this in record time. We then build on these developments, adding hubs based around visa guidelines, and employment law matters. Cargo was also recently behind the launch of our new firm-wide website which sits at the heart of our recent rebrand.”
Looking to the future of Cargo, Paul added: “Our aim for the next three years is to achieve an annual turnover of £1m but to keep our team a close knit one. It’s never been an ambition to employ 100 plus people, we love the family feel that comes with a smaller team and our clients also appreciate having that one point of contact who is extremely talented and capable.”
Based on the picturesque Howard Street in North Shields, Cargo Creative prides itself on delivering quality work to a range of sectors including leisure, professional services and engineering. With a team of 12, all of whom are client-facing, it specialises in website design and build and digital marketing.
