What’s in a Name?

When you start an agency - or indeed, any business - you can spend an awful lot of time worrying about what you’re going to call yourself. We settled on Bicycle reasonably quickly after promising ourselves we weren’t going to expend any unnecessary time, money or effort on a convoluted naming exercise: all finite resources that are in-demand and stretched in any start-up environment.

Who doesn’t love a bike? It’s a marvellous object: beautiful in its simplicity and its capacity to change a person’s interaction and experience with their environment. Critically, though, it’s a machine that requires a human at the heart of it to work - its fantastic latent potential is nothing without a real, living, breathing individual working the pedals. To us, this felt like a metaphor for our industry - we have incredible data, systems and machinery all around us, yet, we believe at least, this is nothing without human interpretation and control. The future of our business isn’t machines, it’s man and machine. Much like a bicycle, momentum won’t be generated without people creating the energy.

Similarly, a bicycle will only move when both wheels work together. Spinning together, harmoniously, in unison. If one stops, or goes too fast without the other, the bike will crash. Perfect flow is created by perfect symmetry. This too reflects an element of our philosophy - the power of ‘and’. We believe that agencies today are too often either / or. Brand OR performance. Creative OR data. On OR offline. This just isn’t reflective of how a modern brand needs to navigate the real world today. So we’ve built a business that allows us to span all these areas: embracing ‘and’. We work best when our ‘wheels’ - data and digital, brand and performance, creative and media - are spinning together, working to move brands forward. Just like a real Bicycle.

Finally, think back to when you got your first Bicycle. When you were young. Maybe at Christmas, or perhaps a birthday. That very first time you got to go where you wanted. Your world opened up just that little bit more. You were, well, free. To us, Bicycle reflects that, too. Freedom. To do what’s right for clients. What’s best for our teams. And to do what it takes to help make the industry move forward.

There’s a quote we’ve been using in our creds which comes from the US census in 1900 that says “few articles ever used by man have created so great a revolution in social conditions as the bicycle”. We hope we can do such a revolutionary object justice. We think we can.