Designers aim to bag a Hat-trick

Three former creative and design directors joined forces to launch a consultancy, Hat-trick on Monday.

The three, Jim Sutherland, Gareth Howat and David Kimpton started out at The Partners. Most recently, Sutherland was creative director at HGV and Howat joins Hat-trick from Glazer where he was design director. Kimpton was design director at Zulver & Co.

Hat-trick hopes to attract clients on the strength of the core skills of its founders, primarily corporate identity and literature, exhibition and front-end website design, says Sutherland. “We aim to stay small and focused for a while, then expand to around 15 people,” he says.

Sutherland wants to form alliances with groups with expertise in other areas, such as technical Web specialists, with a view to pitching jointly for projects. “We want to become as broad-based as possible to prevent us from going stale,” he adds.

One of the first projects for the consultancy is creating an identity and corporate literature, and designing a website and proposal documents for building design and project management company Maleonm, which launches in three weeks’ time.

It won the project following a two-way paid creative pitch against an unnamed consultancy.

Hat-trick is also creating the identity, corporate literature and website for Strum, which runs educational music workshops at schools in London.

The Hat-trick team has won several awards in recent years at other consultancies, including two British Design & Art Direction Silver nominations and a Design Week Award.