Circus started with a band of like-minded souls. We came from advertising, design and client roles, sharing a commitment to create a new type of consultancy.
Chapter one was energetic, exploratory and short. In 2001, the co-founders moved on to invent brands, launch businesses and write novels. Bright adventures all.
Dilys took Circus forward, developing its practice and honing its philosophy.
Dilys’s own career had moved between client and agency roles. She started in advertising before moving client-side to Bonhams Auctioneers, Habitat and The Body Shop, with senior roles at Imagination and Fitch.
Across agency and client roles, two insights stuck.
The first was the importance of conviction.
Working for Terence Conran, and later Anita and Gordon Roddick, Dilys lived in organisations with a very particular view of the world — an evangelical belief in what business could be.
Make money, yes. Make a good business too.
Belief shaped what they made, how they behaved, what they valued, and what they did not. Colleagues and customers were cherished. It was an early lesson in business as a force for good — commercially strong and uncompromising in its intent.
The second was the potency of imagination.
Imagination is our most important currency — in commerce, culture and life. Yet the client day job often leaves little time to look out, look up or imagine something different.
Circus is designed to hold both: to help clients articulate and codify conviction and create room for imaginative thinking.
The useful juxtaposition. The unexpected connection. A different view of what might come next.
Surely smart to start with strategy. Be clear about what an organisation believes and what it seeks to offer the world. Then embed this thinking across the business — commercially and culturally, for colleague and customer. Let communications and expression follow elegantly.
Alongside Circus, Dilys works as a Non-Executive Director, Board Advisor and Trustee. Currently on the Board of Responsible Travel, she has held roles with The White Company, Sophia Webster, Wiggle, Contemporary Applied Arts and others.
Nearly three decades on, the Circus philosophy remains evergreen. The practice evolves.