Kip Calderara and Rick Pirroni have been working together for close on 10 years.

We create brands, advertising, design and marketing communications and we’re very good at it.

We like to develop pure concepts, free ideas, ideas that challenge the accepted norm, ideas that possess an internal dynamic similar to life.

Then we go and have a pizza.

Ideas junkie Kip was a 60’s flower child, played piano, wrote songs, worked for a record company and then fled for the security of the advertising industry. He spent the next thirty years coming up with bright ideas as a producer, writer and creative director in the UK and internationally. From detergents to TVs, to lager, these seemed to work. Clients made money, he won prizes; he even sold London to London. Someone once told him he could do more with half a dozen words than anyone else alive. That felt nice, if a little overblown.

 

Born into a family of restaurateurs, Rick didn't want to join the business. For the last 25 years he has been creating things that don’t need washing up. Making things from scratch, drawing and designing things that work, that make people laugh, or think, or feel. A recognised authority on cake, he’s also a graphic designer, art director, book designer, animator and conceptualist with a love of dogs, mice, and bees.

It’s only a small step to get technical; if you’re going to create things you need to understand the processes, the technologies, the physics. So he has developed a deep understanding of things online, from web design and computer mechanics to 3D printing.

 

Kip and Ian go back a bit further, teaming up in the eighties, on national brands like Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson Wax and Seagrams. They used to say we were the horse and cart that you could drive through any national marketing strategy; they never specified who was which.

The consummate brand pilot, Ian Dunlop, is about as international as an international client services director gets. Born in Brazil of Scottish heritage, grew up in Africa, educated in England and for 10 years an agency head in Tokyo, selling Volkswagens to the Japanese; somehow he managed to fit a twenty-year career in London, China, Frankfurt and the Gulf into the mix. That someone so perceptive and accomplished can also be such good company can come as something of a shock to many, but all we can say about that is, ‘Get over it’.