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2017
Office Puggle
Our MD bought us a new company mascot – Instagram: A_Puggle_Called_Bailey
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2017
The best year yet
It has been a crazy few years. We’re excited to launch our new website showcasing the amazing projects we’ve all been working on and are expecting our best year yet.
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2016
New beginnings
In 2016 we joined forces with a larger network called Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in order to compete for bigger and better projects. We loved being a Co-operative but needed a new structure fitting of a top agency. Our values and principles have never changed.
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2013
Best Social Enterprise Award
We took a phone call from Leicester 4 Business saying we had been nominated for an award. Against tough competition and in absolute disbelief we won Best Social Enterprise Award.
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2013
Team work makes the dream work
During 2013 on top of client work, we were constantly out and about in the evenings and weekends helping with festivals and cultural events across Leicester. We decided to take a camera and record our journey. We put this footage together for Leicester City Council to assist with their cultural bid.
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2012
There’s no place like home
We had our business and had taken on some customers but needed somewhere to call home. After months of searching we found a shared office on Wellington Street in Leicester City Centre. This would become Nifty HQ for the next 5 years.
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2012
Nifty Thinking Co-operative was born
We were lucky enough to find another mentor in Dorothy at Case-Da. Dorothy and her team helped with the paper work and Nifty Thinking Ltd was born. We chose a Co-operative business structure because it matched our values and principles.
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2012
We needed a name
In order to start something special we needed a name our customers could trust. Here we locked our selves away in a room full of white boards for a whole week and came up with Nifty Thinking.
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2011
Incubated
We had our dream team but no one really knew how to run a business. Luckily we we’re accepted on to the Creative Enterprise Hub’s business incubation scheme. Over the course of a year we were mentored and trained on how to run a business.
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2010
Way back when
This is where it all began. After meeting and working with some dedicated freelancers who all shared the same values, we knew we were destined to work on bigger and better projects.
About us
We are Nifty Thinking
All the right ingredients
About Us
Welcome to our about us. In 2011, as part of a local marketing project, a group of creative freelancers met. It didn’t take long for this newly acquainted team to realise that their collective skill-set was unique. It made sense that this team should dare to dream and make things a more official: Nifty Thinking was born.
In order to make this Creative Media Agency a success, Nifty realised there should be some agreed values it should work by. In that, Nifty could always be sure that their business was conducted with the following principles in mind:
- All members should have a say in all decision making
- All profits should be fairly shared by its members
- We should embrace community-based projects
- We must promote sustainable trades and be environmentally “Green”
- We should always strive for excellence
In light of this, it was decided to setup a Co-operative. As a Cooperative business, this gave us the power to grow, whilst enjoying an established network of users and suppliers. We were able to form some solid connections within the creative industry but furthermore gain support from some highly esteemed, local mentors; these included Dorothy Francis MBE of Co-operative and Social Enterprise Development Agency, and Russ Pacey of Creative Enterprise Hub.
During our time as a cooperative business, we undertook a number of campaigns where we were able to harness an enormous amount of experience and insight. This led Nifty to the acquisition of some fantastic projects and our team began to expand. Growing career opportunities at Nifty meant that we could work with interns and freelancers from other disciplines. As a result, our agency was offering more and more marketing and promotion services.
In 2013 Nifty Thinking won the Best Social Enterprise at Leicester Business Awards. Since then, our expertise has been increasingly sought by many other corporates; charities; and local cultural projects- most notably, Leicester’s Cultural Bid 2017.
“What Now”
In March 2016, it was decided that if Nifty were to continue growing, improving services and supporting career opportunities, we needed to go for bigger accounts. To do this, we registered as a Limited Company. Although our departure from the cooperative forges broader opportunities for lager projects, it will not affect the essence of Nifty: Our strong, ethical, credibility has not changed, and our environmental responsibility will not be compromised- after all, it is these attributes that have been instrumental in our achievements so far.
As discussed, this structural change aligns us better in the market so we can compete for larger projects. We can now cast the net further and are better equipped, with a fuller suite of services. To find out more about what we do, please visit our services page. To see what we do and meet our lovely clients, please visit our portfolio page.
