How Aim & Grace Came to Be

Running my own business has always been a dream. For years I joked with travel industry friends about setting up an agency one day - female-led, with expertise across all areas of travel, offering proper strategic advice. I'm a big believer in things happening at the right time, and in the right people coming into your life to make them happen.

‍A list, a marathon and a lot of thinking time
‍It was while I was working towards one dream that I found the time to properly consider the other. I'd started training for the London Marathon and the training taught me a lot about myself. I ran without music, which gave me hours and hours to think, and mile after mile I kept coming back to the agency. I thought about the breadth of experience Amy and I had between us, from in-house to agency, crisis to launches, airlines to tourism boards. And I thought about the gap in the market we could fill.

‍Protecting a reputation one day, building it the next
‍My first PR job was in tech, turning software for brands such as Vodafone and Adobe into stories people actually wanted to read. I then spent 14 years at TUI turning big brand moments into unmissable stories. I designed and delivered communications strategies for new routes, hotel openings, store openings and ship launches, and led the comms for the UK launch of the Boeing Dreamliner, greeting it on the runway with hundreds of media. I also led the transformation of Thomson into TUI, one of the biggest rebrands in UK travel history, engaging more than 12,000 colleagues through content, training and gamification. Along the way I put executives on the BBC Breakfast sofa, sent freerunners up the side of a newly refurbished cruise ship and took The Only Way Is Essex to Lapland for a Christmas special that helped double bookings the following year.

I also handled some of the toughest crises anyone in travel comms can face, from sickness outbreaks and customer deaths to fleet groundings and delayed openings not to mention a pandemic. Those moments teach you what really matters - a calm head, a clear strategy and genuine care for the people affected.

Fourteen years in-house also means I know exactly what it feels like to be the client. In-house teams are leaner than ever and budgets are shrinking, yet the people left are expected to deliver more. They don't need more headcount on their account. They need experienced counsel who understand the pressure of a board meeting and a story breaking at 3am, and who will roll their sleeves up.

‍The yin to my yang
‍During my time at FINN Partners I had the joy of working with Amy, and she is the yin to my yang. Our skills are different, but they fit. We also share a slightly strange love of crisis comms, and there's no one I'd rather have next to me when managing an incident response.

Working with Amy has been genuinely inspiring. As well as being an incredibly talented and connected comms expert, she's a real cheerleader, and is the reason I entered TTMA Travel PR Professional of the Year. Together we led the team that won PR Agency of the Year at both the TravMedia Awards and the Travel Marketing Awards in consecutive years. Along those long miles, the idea of Aim & Grace was born.

‍What we’ve set out to build
‍The agency we imagined was one we'd want to work with ourselves. Having sat on both sides of the desk, we knew what a brilliant partnership felt like, and what it felt like when it was missing. We wanted every client, whatever their size, to have the two of us - senior people who know their business, pick up the phone and care about the outcome as much as they do.

We wanted to be honest, even when it isn't the easy answer, and to start every piece of work with strategy rather than a template. We wanted PR, social media and GEO under one roof, because that's how travellers discover the world now, backed by a network of specialists who are awesome at what they do and who we trust.

Most of all, we wanted to do good work for brands that do good. Tourism can make a real, positive difference to places and communities when it's done well. We've seen that ourselves over the decades we’ve spent in the travel industry, and we want Aim & Grace to be part of that.

‍So, here we are
Setting up a new business and running the marathon in the same year, I've learned that both get done the same way - one mile at a time, with the right people cheering you on. Thank you to everyone who already has. If you're a tourism board, airline, hotel group, tour operator or travel brand looking for a partner who can protect your reputation and build it, we'd love to hear from you.

Drop us a line at hello@aimandgrace.com.