Simon Waterfall resurfaces with new venture Fray

He says he has been driven to set up the venture by a personal ’hostility’ towards the standard consultancy practice of deploying specialist teams in isolation on projects – and towards overstaffing. Waterfall says, ’We want to pull apart the network [model] that exists at the moment, whereby staff in multi-consultancies work in large teams across multi-disciplines.’

He adds, ’The idea that some of the best people in the world for each individual job will all fit into one single group is a fallacy.’ Waterfall would not disclose the size of his consultancy and joked that it already had 3500 staff.

He suggests that he will lead projects with a ’core team’ which will follow each project across disciplines from start to finish. ’I’d rather work with five people who I know are brilliant, or use the army of freelances that is out there,’ he says.

Promising to ’defend the fragile creative inspiration through each discipline’, Waterfall says he will approach work with a philosophy of ’the least moving parts, the better’. Conceding that his business plan is ’nothing new’, Waterfall describes the decision to set up the consultancy as timely’, as it will draw on his collective experiences.

Waterfall trained as a product designer, before entering the gaming industry at 16, co-founding Deepend in 1994 and Poke in 2000 and holding the post of President at D&AD in 2006. Offering creative innovation, ’ambassadorial’, digital, product and advertising consultancy, Waterfall says Fray would consider working with ’Nasa, Nestlé or No More Nails’.

Although not searching for new business or recruiting staff at the moment, Waterfall says ’We’re always looking for the right people’ and aims to reveal a major client in two weeks’ time. ’I’ll always look to recruit people brighter then myself,’ he adds.

The Fray identity has been designed by Michael C Place, graphic designer and founder of consultancy Build. Business cards designed by Place feature a debossed blank space for staff to write their names, which abuts the company e-mail template completing the e-mail address.