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NICHE FAME: HOW TO MAKE YOUR BUSINESS FAMOUS
4 lessons from one of the UK’s most memorable agency brands...
Niall Ratcliffe
July 06, 2025
Morning!
The last two weeks have been the most excited I’ve felt at work in over a year.
That’s mostly down to one meeting I had last Monday with Stephen Kenwright.
Stephen’s got one of the sharpest marketing and agency minds I’ve come across. The conversation we had completely re-energised how I think about what we’re building at noticed. But more importantly, gave me a lot of insight into how we should be marketing ourselves.
Today, I’m going to share the biggest lessons I took from that meeting and how I think they’ll help us grow one of the UK’s most well-known B2B marketing agencies.
Let’s get into it!
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BREAKING DOWN THE STRATEGY
When I was in my final year of university, I started looking for jobs in marketing agencies in the UK. But I didn’t want to just join any old agency, I wanted to join an agency that was growing, exciting, running fun campaigns, and working with cool clients.
You’d think it’d be quite easy to find an agency that ticked all of those boxes, but when I actually started looking… there were very few.
But there was one that did tick all of those boxes, in fact, it looked like it was exactly what I was looking for. They were rapidly growing, working with major brands like Boohoo and Xbox, and everyone seemed to be talking about them.
That brand was Rise At Seven.
I updated my CV. Wrote a clever cover letter. Threw my ring in the hat. Then… got a sad email back to say I wasn’t a fit.
Oh well, better look next time.
Fast forward 5 years to last Monday, and I wasn’t applying for jobs at Rise At Seven, instead… I was spending the day with the company’s co-founder, Stephen Kenwright.
Yep, quite the full circle moment.
We’re working with Kenwright to take our agency - noticed. - to the next level, and on Monday, we did a full 8-hour advisory session. It’s safe to say we got a lot out of the day, but one of the most important lessons I learned was the formula Stephen and Carrie used to make Rise such a well-known brand in the space.
What they did wasn’t rocket science (it was actually quite repeatable), but what it did was make them niche famous - and today I’m going to show you how you can do the same.
Here are 4 lessons I learned from Kenwright on how to become niche famous:
Lesson 1: Act As A Mirror
Firstly, Stephen told us that when Rise at Seven first launched, him and Carrie had a crystal-clear idea of who they wanted to work with: fast-growing, exciting consumer brands, particularly in the fashion space.
They weren’t against working with others, but their ambition was to become the go-to agency for brands with hype, style, and often a Gen Z audience.
So rather than building a generic agency brand and hoping the right clients would come knocking, they built a brand that looked and felt like the brands they wanted to attract.
The colour palette they chose mirrored the aesthetics of top fashion labels at the time. Their tone of voice (especially in decks and on socials) was intentionally informal, bold, and Gen Z-native. Their content looked like it belonged on a fashion brand’s feed, not a traditional agency’s.
Everything was intentional. Everything was a mirror.
And it worked. In marketing, people are drawn to brands that reflect their identity back to them. We trust and resonate with what feels familiar.
Stephen said this mirroring was crucial in Rise’s early traction. Because even in year 1, when they hadn’t really established themselves as a major player in the space, fashion and consumer brands were still coming to them. Mainly because they felt it was so clear that Rise knew who they were and how they wanted to come across. These companies didn’t just consider Rise as an option. They saw them as the only option.
The takeaway is simple: the fastest way to attract your dream clients is to look, sound, and act like them. Your branding, messaging, and positioning shouldn’t just reflect who you are. It should reflect who they are.
Your target audience should feel like they’re looking at themselves when they look at you.
Lesson 2: Who You Shout About, Is Who You Get More Of
On that note, Stephen explained how important it was that Rise at Seven focused on promoting the case studies and client wins that aligned with the types of brands they wanted more of.
The idea was simple: The type of brands you shout about will be the type of brands you get more of.
And if you shout about every client you’ve ever worked with, no matter the sector or style, you end up attracting a disconnected, messy bunch of brands. There’s no clear positioning. No clear appeal.
Instead, you need to be deliberate. You need to shout about the clients you want more of.
In Rise’s case, they had a bunch of gambling firms on their roster that they did great work for. But if all Rise promoted were their gambling case studies, then guess what? They would get more gambling firms knocking on their door. Because they would be broadcasting the message: “We work with people like you. Come and work with us.”
Then, in doing so, they’d “Turn off” the big consumer brands they wanted to go after. The fashion brands. The Boohoos and PLTs. Those clients would not have seen themselves in the brand, and they would not have reached out.
So instead, Rise made a conscious decision. They looked at their roster, identified the clients that felt like their dream brands, and made those the focus of their marketing. They doubled down on those names in their pitch decks, their press, their content, and every time they talked about results.
The best example of this strategy in action was Misguided. Rise signed Missguided as a client early on (I think it was in year 1). And they went big on promoting that partnership. For months after, their marketing revolved around it. The case studies. The social proof.
Within the next two years, they signed a wave of brands that looked just like Missguided, from Boohoo to PrettyLittleThing and more.
What Stephen helped me realise is that your case studies and client comms aren’t just a reflection of who you’ve worked with. They end up shaping who comes next. So if you want more of a certain type of brand, it makes sense to spotlight the ones that already fit that mould.
Lesson 3: Have Key Fluent Devices
One of the most interesting things Stephen talked about was the idea of Rise at Seven’s fluent devices.
There was something about Rise at Seven that made them stick in people’s minds. If you look back at their brand over the last five or six years, you’ll notice that, for some reason, they seemed more memorable than most other agencies. Some agencies were growing faster. Others had bigger teams or were spending more on marketing. Yet Rise just seemed to stay top of mind.
Stephen credits a lot of that to fluent devices.
In simple terms, fluent devices are distinctive brand elements that people start to associate with you. Rise used them in different ways, and over time, they became embedded in how people thought about the agency.
One of the most well-known was a phrase they used repeatedly in their marketing: “Making SEO sexy.” It was bold, slightly cheeky, and totally unlike what most SEO agencies were saying. They even printed it on a mirror in their first Sheffield office, where visitors would take selfies and post them on LinkedIn.
Another one was the line, “If it looks like a Rise at Seven campaign, it probably was.” It started out as a brand phrase, but then people online began picking it up. You would see people on Twitter saying, “That looks like a Rise campaign” or repeating the line in conversations. It gave the work a reputation of its own.
They also created distinct visual cues. In their Sheffield office, they installed bright colours, cherry blossom trees, and other creative decor that made the space instantly recognisable. No other agency had an office that looked like that, and it reinforced the idea that Rise was bold and different.
One of my favourites was the “Bath of Trophies.” It was literally a bathtub filled with the awards they had won. I think they actually took the idea from another company, but it worked. It was fun, memorable, and most importantly, it was a visual metaphor for their results. You did not need to read a case study. One photo of that bath told you everything you needed to know.
What all these things had in common was that they were easy to remember, easy to repeat, and easy to associate with the brand. “Making SEO sexy” told you they were not a boring agency. The bath of trophies showed you they won a lot. The cherry blossoms and office decor told you they were creative.
None of it was accidental. These fluent devices helped embed Rise into the culture of the industry.
Lesson 4: Make Marketing Everyone’s Job
Arguably my favourite marketing takeaway from the entire day, was something actually quite simple that Stephen said.
He said, “At Rise, marketing was everyone’s job.”
It sounds simple, but he said the impact it had was huge.
Even now, Rise currently has 80+ staff across offices in NYC, Sheffield, and Manchester and yet only 2 people belong to their marketing team. That’s it. For an agency doing tens of millions a year, with three different offices and content operating across the US, UK and Europe, that’s almost unthinkable.
And yet, their brand is everywhere.
Stephen credited that to the idea that “marketing was everyone’s job”.
There were a few simple ways they made this happen:
They brought in Ash Jones to speak with the entire team about how to share content effectively and build their personal brands. Giving people the skills and direction to share more content online.
They encouraged the team to post and supported them however they could. Even just by shouting out those who were doing it.
Create more sharable moments in the office with simple things like places people could pose in front of a mirror or with the Rise At Seven logo in the background.
This wasn’t some complex funnel or paid campaign. It was just their people, talking about the company they worked for in an authentic way.
By far the simplest lesson I talked about in this breakdown, but I genuinely think this is something every business should take seriously.
Stephen was clear that this approach had a massive impact on how Rise grew its brand.
🌱 THE GREENHOUSE
Things I’ve saved this week that are worth seeing:
TL;DR
1/ Act Like A Mirror
2/ Who You Shout About, Is Who You Get More Of
3/ Use Fluent Devices
4/ Marketing Is Everyone’s Job
I hope you found these lessons as useful as I did. If you did, please do share this newsletter with a friend - it helps :)
Until next Sunday.
— Niall
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