Why we’re choosing collective over corporate

In 2010, in a corner of an office above Exmouth Market, a fledgling studio was taking form. We’d just left the big agency world, trading it in for something much more powerful and inspiring: our independence.

Independence is a big part of what defines The Clearing. For us, it’s the reason we can be obsessive about how we work, what we do, who we do it for - and who we make it with. For our clients, it means you know exactly who you’re getting when you work with us. There’s no pitch team bait-and-switch, no egos or bureaucracy.

We know we’d never want to dilute it. But we started to wonder - what if we multiplied it?

That’s why we’ve joined the Harbour Collective. It’s a network of like-minded, independent specialist agencies. It’s not just about faster collaboration; it’s about making each of us better:

We keep our flexibility. We still work the way we want, that works best for our clients, without any enforced project model or compulsory partners.

We extend our creative reach. By surrounding ourselves with other independent specialists, we’re part of a broader creative culture that prioritises the craft over the spreadsheet.

We fill each other’s gaps. When a client asks us about something outside our core skills - whether that’s CRM, PR or performance marketing - we can now turn to a specialist who lives and breathes that discipline. It encourages all of us to stay sharp so that our partners want to collaborate with us.

It’s not the tried, tested (and frankly, tired) consolidated global group model. It’s a more powerful approach. You get the agility, seniority and dedication of an independent agency, backed by the combined expertise of specialists who are the best at what they do.

For us, joining Harbour Collective doesn’t change who we are - it multiplies what we can offer. We're still The Clearing - same people, same obsessions, same way of working. We've just made sure that whatever our clients need, we can bring in the best team for it.