Minx Design | Design , Marketing and Web Agency | Whitchurch, Hampshire

Fans of The Apprentice since it first came to our screens six years’ ago will know Tim Campbell as the programme’s first ever winner. Before applying to appear on the show Tim, a psychology graduate from Middlesex University, had a successful career with London Underground where he progressed from a Graduate Trainee to a Senior Marketing Project Manager.

Tim was kept on as Project Director of the Health & Beauty division of Amstrad PLC for an additional 12 months after the initial 12-month contract expired and left the company in March 2007 to set up his own company, Bright Ideas Trust. Simultaneously, Tim took on the role of a Social Enterprise Ambassador as part of the Government’s initiative at that time, which aimed to apply modern business solutions to social and environmental problems.

Bright Ideas Trust is a charitable organisation which exists to provide a package of funding and business support – through  a network of Mentors, Advisors, Partners and Financial Supporters – to 16-30 year olds living in London who are not in employment, education or training, or are from socially excluded groups, and who are looking to start up their own business. There are no handouts, it is real-life business for both the young people and their backers. While Bright Ideas Trust buys equity in the start-up businesses they will ultimately want to exit from the investment, taking their returns to put back into running the charity and helping yet more budding entrepreneurs.

Boris Johnson, London’s Mayor, was behind the trust from the beginning, stating, “Bright Ideas Trust will be working across London to ensure they can help young people unlock the positive futures they deserve. I fully support this new approach to business support with a model that moves away from handouts and grants and provides valuable bespoke support and mentoring.”

Tim’s natural ability to strike up rapport with an unemployed young person or a high-profile business professional with ease has contributed to the huge success of Bright Ideas Trust. The charity’s current supporters include names as big as Bank of America; Accenture; Taylor Wessing; Ernst & Young; and WPP, all of whom donate financially and/or through pro bono professional services work and volunteering. The charity’s successful young entrepreneurs include the owner of a beauty salon in Hackney, the owner of a graphic design company specialising in bespoke gifts, a pyjama designer, and the owner of a commercial-and-domestic cleaning company.

With his obvious sixth sense for seeking out talent, hard grafters and good all round value we were flattered here at minx design to have been approached by Tim to create the trust’s brand new website. With our strong work ethic and social conscience his business is something we have a lot of respect for – there was never a question of our saying no! Having worked very successfully in the past with the organisation producing many and varied marketing and promotional materials for print, we saw this as an ideal opportunity too to showcase our talents as an agency just as competent when creating with pixels on screen as we are when designing for print onto paper. What we’ve created is a contemporary, easy to navigate, transparent and accessible website which will appeal to the specific target audience profiled. As part of the whole site we’ve created an online application process which handles the applications through to a back-end management system used by the admin staff at Bright Ideas Trust.

Bright Ideas Trust has grown in four years from a proposed initiative to a fully-fledged successful venture and Tim’s intention is to roll it out nationally. When this occurs we hope to pick up more work from them. With their tireless endeavour to make a difference to the lives of young people through employment and the confidence, freedom and self-worth that comes with it, minx design are proud to be have an association with the organisation.

Visit: brightideastrust.com

The first ever Renewables Awards inspires the industry to greater heights with Julia Bradbury, Michael McIntyre & 800 guests.

The great, the green & the good gathered together at the Ricoh Arena on Thursday 8th September to celebrate success in the renewables industry. Hosted by the BBC’s Julia Bradbury and with entertainment provided by the UK’s No.1 comedian, Michael McIntyre, guests enjoyed an exceptional evening of entertainment.

Hundreds of entries were judged by a panel of industry experts from BRE, Green Heat, HHIC, HVCA & Wolseley and notable winners included Barry Primett of Source Heat Pumps who walked off with the ‘New MCS Installer’ of the year award & Clearly Hybrid by Glow-worm which won the ‘Green Invention of the year’ award.

The winner of the overall ‘Renewables Installer of the year’ was Ground Heat Installations, who picked up an award and a cheque for £10,000 generously donated by sponsors Plumb Center.

minx design were proudly in attendance to witness the myriad of elements that we’d contributed to the awards – from the menus, wine tags, seating plan, logos and supporting marketing material. We’ve heard some really great things about the marketing/design and we’re once again looking for 2012 and moving on to bigger and getter ideas.

For a first-year series of events, we are all delighted with both the quality and quantity of visitors in attendance. This is just the beginning though, as we’re determined to make the Renewables Roadshow 2012 bigger and better than ever before.

We have received encouraging comments about the Renewables Roadshow & the Renewables Awards and Twitter is awash with glowing reports of how good the events have been.

Renewables Roadshow 2012 will be returning to Harrogate International Centre, Ricoh Arena (Coventry), SECC (Glasgow) & Wembley Stadium (London) as well as including Westpoint Arena (Exeter) & Event City (Manchester) for 2012.

minx design have been helping the Renewables Roadshow team every step of the way – whether it be creating the advertising, placing adverts, arranging press releases, printing t-shirts, banners, pop-up stands or keeping the website up-to-date and sending out thousands of e-mails we’re very proud of our achievements. With attendance being much higher than expected and people already excited about visiting in 2012 we’re obviously doing something right.

After many months minx have almost finished producing three new sites for Capita Children’s Services, based in Bedford. Originally receiving the brief to overhaul the design of their current site it became clear that the business would benefit from three sites to profile the particular different market channels. We have spent the past few months designing and developing the new sites in Drupal and are very proud of the result. We’re just in the final push to get these sites live in the next week or so – but, knowing that the client is extremely happy with all of the aspects of creating these huge sites makes the job all the more worthwhile.

Over the past few months we have been helping Business Monitor International revitalise some of their marketing collateral with the production of a large number of flyers. We have thoroughly enjoyed working with Business Monitor International and despite the volume have kept the client very happy and managed to handle everything that they’ve been throwing at us.

The first Renewables Roadshow event at Bolton saw larger than anticipated attendances and was welcomed by Sponsors and Exhibitors alike as the start of something really special. The Roadshow resumes tomorrow at Coventry – which will also host the Renewables Awards where Michael McIntyre will be performing. Further events are being held at Harrogate, London, Glasgow and Cheltenham over the next two weeks. minx design are very proud of all of the work that we’ve put into developing the brand, marketing, advertising and promotional elements to fuel this success. With booking already being taken for 2012 – our work will continue. Well done everyone who has been involved – who thought that it’s only taken 10 months to put all of this together.

Minx design are delighted to be partnering with the Renewables Roadshow on this new and vitally important series of events for the Renewables Industry, working on all visual assets including website, e-shots, an extensive campaign of trade  press advertising, event branding and essential event marketing collateral.

In keeping with its ‘mantra’, the Renewables Roadshow has avoided printing thousands of leaflets for promotional purposes but his has meant it needed to establish its identity in the market place very quickly. So far so very good, as the logo and key messages have achieved high levels of unprompted recall among trade professionals across many core disciplines and registrations for tickets are very encouraging.

On 1 April the South Downs National Park Authority took lead responsibility for keeping the South Downs National Park a special place. Loving a party, we minxes were delighted to be invited along to share in the open day celebrations. Prior to letting our hair down, however, there was work to be done and we were involved in producing marketing collateral that both promoted conservation and helped visitors to understand and enjoy the Park.

Minx design continue to produce M&A Insider, mergermarket’s monthly report which is the definitive crib sheet to what is happening in global Mergers & Acquisitions. With a request from the report’s sponsors to now also include a quarterly version, the challenge here was to incorporate the additional facts and figures seamlessly. We worked methodically and accurately and completed a very lovely, reader-friendly first quarterly edition – to the absolute delight of our client and the sponsor alike.

The month of June saw Enham opening Coopers Chase, the first of their Building Choices developments to be completed. Building Choices is designed to offer life choices for disabled people by giving them a wide variety of homes suitable for their needs and to help them live an independent and fulfilled life, with choices. In the run up to the grand opening by The Rt Hon Sir George Young Bt MP, minx design were beavering away designing the plaque for the aforementioned to unveil on the big day; creating large amounts of internal and external signage in various shapes, sizes and finishes for the new development; producing several brochures for visitors to the opening and beyond; and pop-up stands extolling the virtues of this new development.