Diversity, transparency, fair work for fair pay and disruptive no retainer model have led to outstanding success for FREEDM

FREEDM is celebrating remarkable company growth in its first five months of business. FREEDM is a brand-new creative agency created to service clients looking for exceptional work from a truly diverse and empowered global workforce. A first of its kind agency worldwide, the business delivers industry leading creative and branding work by empowering and elevating global creative professionals without barriers or bias. This approach to a deeply diverse team allows for previously unseen talent to be impacting the region for the first time.

The UAE-headquartered agency has secured more than a dozen clients purely through reputation alone, and the agency’s rapid growth underlines that demand to conduct more meaningful business with purpose – with a human-centred, empathetic approach – is spreading to the marketing and advertising sectors. 

FREEDM brings a fresh new human, empathy-centric approach to business, and now works with 13 clients from the USA, Sri Lanka, UAE, Indonesia, South Africa, the Netherlands, Egypt and KSA. Clients appreciate FREEDM’s UNESCO SDG-aligned approach to business, and the choice to innovate with new financial partnership models that move away from old fashioned retainers.

With a global approach to business, Dubai was chosen as a hub for the emergent brand, which has a staff across the USA, UAE, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Singapore and India. FREEDM’s growing business will see a new hub opening in Sri Lanka in 2022. 

Creative CEO and bestselling author, Mimi Nicklin, says: “Beyond our commitment to conscientious business I believe our new value based model is proving that the existing agency models are outdated. The more clients I speak to the more I realise most don’t want arduous contracts and long term retainers that hide from transparent partnership. Both clients and agencies work better together when focused on strategic and creative projects that extract true passion and clear shared value creation.”

FREEDM’s diverse team members follow the philosophy that true diversity starts with the hiring base – the agency actively works with people with no previous agency experience or with alternate industry experience as well as people from branding, production and B2B backgrounds. 

FREEDM’s carefully-curated team has diversity at its core. Team members with physical and neuro diversity will be joining the team in early 2022.

Mimi adds: “The momentum has been humbling. I feel so reassured that clients across sectors from FMCG, travel, real estate, beauty, organisational performance and coaching have found resonance in working with an entirely new model. 

“It’s a scary thing to do, to change everything our industry knew, but every day a client reminds us we are doing the right thing. 2021 is ending as a year when the world has truly shifted and client expectations and openness to evolution has changed.”