Free.studio, the Australian independent creative partnership founded by ex-adam&eveDDB managing partner and global cummins&partners CEO, Michael McConville, has opened an office in Farringdon, London, with eight founding members from a range of leading UK creative agencies and adjacent services – responsible between them  for some of the most decorated creative work in British advertising over the past two decades.

The London founding partnership, led by McConville, includes the team behind the John Lewis Always a Woman campaign, the former global managing director of Range Rover, senior creatives from BBH and adam&eveDDB, and the BAFTA-winning inventor of the Rubik’s Connected Cube:

• Sophie Lewis, Chief Strategy Officer, previously of M&C Saatchi, Mother and BBH amongst others
• Geraldine Ingham, former Global Managing Director of Range Rover, Global Head of Automotive at Meta, and Marketing Director of Volkswagen UK
• Dino Burbridge, formerly of Sky Innovation Lab and the BAFTA-winning inventor of the Rubik’s Connected Cube
• Dave Johnson, creative director, screenwriter and co-founder of The Glue Society
• Christopher Ringsell, two decades of award-winning work for Women’s Aid, the RAF and the BBC
• Steve Wioland and Matt Woolner, the creative team behind the John Lewis Always a Woman campaign and globally recognised creatives for Volkswagen, McCain and countless others
• Steven Halliday, Director London, formerly of adam&eveDDB

free.studio isn’t an agency. It’s a member-funded creative partnership – a deliberately different construction, built to put talent and clients together in service of ideas, without the structures that normally sit between them. It was founded “to remove the constraints of the current agency-client model and create a space where brilliant ideas can come to life”, and is designed to give brands direct access to seasoned creatives and industry specialists.

free.studio members, the free-folk, contribute toward the cost of running the studio. That means those costs are never bundled into what clients pay. No overhead. No multiplier. No retainers. Clients pay for talent and outcomes, directly. The talent, in turn, get to work on real problems with real creative freedom – because there’s no commercial pressure asking them to be convenient rather than right. And talent get paid fairly, and well as the rates aren’t covering internal, traditional-agency expense. 

The model also determines what the partnership can carry. Because capabilities don’t have to be justified on a typical agency P&L, free.studio can bring in disciplines – across creative, strategy, technology, entertainment, cause-related work and well beyond – that a traditional structure couldn’t sustain. The cast is assembled for the task. Not the other way around.

McConville says that the result is something designed to serve everyone better – talent who choose the work; clients who get the right people, not just the available ones; and ideas that can be followed wherever they need to go, rather than fitted to a model protecting itself first. In practice, the London founding cohort is what that proposition looks like when the right people take it seriously.

For Australian clients, the London launch adds something different – a cohort of senior creative and strategic talent at the centre of British advertising, available not as a remote resource, but as colleagues. The free-folk in London bring their own clients, work and perspective into a partnership that now spans both sides of the world.

“This isn’t an agency, and we didn’t want it to be,” McConville stated. “The best creative-and-adjacent people have been choosing for years between making work directly with the clients who need it, and sitting inside a longer process that protects the agency business first. We’ve built the thing that puts the trust where it matters — between the talent and the client, with the work binding them. Clients get the right people on the right brief. Talent gets real work, real problems, real partnership with the people who want the same thing. That’s the deal.”

“The way free.studio is built allows us to approach every client challenge neutrally – with no preconceived ideas about what the answer should be,” added Sophie Lewis, chief strategy officer. “We help work out the question, and can then put together exactly the right team to answer it.”

free.studio is building out the partnership across strategy, technology, entertainment, cause-related work and business creativity — and a broader set of creative-and-adjacent capabilities that often don’t find a home in a traditional agency.