The latest interview in our brand new Ask the Creator series is with Hannah Darvas, Creator and co-founder of Fresheather. Discover her story and how she transformed her passion into her job 🙂
How did you become a Creator and how has that changed your life?
Instagram was immediately a platform that sparked my creativity. In 2013, through the app, I met my business partner Heather who at the time was one of the only bloggers using stop motion video. I was mesmerised by her talents and saw a gap in the market for short format videos. Fast forward 5 years and we have now established a very successful production company working with brands worldwide to produce show-stopping visual content.
Where do you take your inspiration from?
For us, inspiration comes from daily life. As a creative, it’s often easy for my team and I to see something beautiful out of the ordinary, give us a camera and a few props and leave it to us!
How long did it take you to settle on your particular online style?
We marketed ourselves as stop motion specialists from the start, but over the years we have discovered that the demands of our clients go much further than this. We now offer a huge range of services which are all associated with marketing and creative content, but it’s all an extension of our initial vision.
What was the toughest stage in building your follower base?
For us, our following is not and will never be our focus. I encourage brands to think in the same way. The term ‘influencer’ in my eyes refers to those that can look at your content and take something away from it. Whether that be inspiration, motivation or even positive lifestyle changes. If you are positively impacting one person then you are doing your job correctly. Focusing on numbers – especially now that social media usage is changing so dramatically – can be an extremely uphill battle.
If you are positively impacting one person then you are doing your job correctly.
How do you choose which campaigns to take and not take?
For our own social feeds, a lot of the content is food/product based, so we try to keep our promotional posts in line with that as it’s important to target the correct audience. As a production team, we typically don’t turn down any campaigns. We produce a lot of white-label content for our clients for use on their own social channels. This allows us to change up shooting styles quite regularly and really experiment across many different industries.
How do you prefer to work with brands?
For us, the perfect brief comprises of the following criteria. Typically, we like to work with creative freedom and encourage our clients to put trust in our ideas. A lot of time, conveying an idea to a non-creative is extremely difficult and can often be misinterpreted – even with visuals – so for us, trust is one of the biggest criteria when working with our clients. To the right is a breakdown of what we believe forms a perfect brief:
- Clarity
- Visual examples
- Specific written ideas
- Expected Timeline
- Dimension Requirements
- Typography Requirements
- Brand Guidelines and Colour Scheme
- Social Demographics
- Target Audience
- Creative Freedom
- Trust
What’s the best/worst experience you’ve had working with a brand?
Best experience for us is taking a brand from square one, working with them to devise a brand strategy and together build beautiful campaigns in line with their growth. These relationships have been built on trust and an open dialogue between our team and theirs.
Our worst experiences have always been down to lack of communication. When a brand tries to take full control of the content that we are creating for our own channel, the post success is usually hindered. Typically when working with any Creator, it is highly important to trust that they will know how to appeal to their own audience.
What strategies, formats, platforms and creative solutions do you believe Creators should be using to drive success?
Clarity within your niche and how you aspire to portray yourself as a person or brand is really important. Your content should always be a reflection of your ethos, and whilst I believe engagement is important to some degree, for us success is driven by producing work that we are proud of.
I think there’s far too much emphasis on a number and not enough emphasis on the quality of content.
What are your thoughts on the ongoing debate around “fake” followers?
I think there’s far too much emphasis on a number and not enough emphasis on the quality of content.
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