Let’s skip the bit where I pretend I’ve always had some neat little five-year plan. Let’s be honest, course I haven’t. Who has? What I do have is a bloody-minded streak (ask my husband), a ridiculously low tolerance for bullshit and a habit of getting straight back up when life decides to kick the legs out from under me.
I’m Rhonda, an unapologetically proud Northerner, mum of three and founder of Flossie & Locke.
How did I get here? Well, a stage 3 breast cancer diagnosis has a funny way of knocking the stuffing (wasn't the first word that came to mind) out of you. It made me sit up, look properly at what I was doing, what I’d been putting off and what I actually wanted the rest of my working life to look like.
Don’t get me wrong, treatment kicked my arse into next week. Everyone around me, including, I suspect, the dog, told me to stop working. That was never really going to happen. I’m stubborn, a control freak and not particularly good at taking a kicking lying down.
So I kept working. Some days from the sofa. Some days from the bathroom floor. Not because I was trying to prove anything. I just needed something that still felt like me while everything else had gone belly up.
By the time I came out the other side, I knew exactly what I had to do next. There isn't a perfect time.
Plus, as it turns out, one of my best assets is a perfectly shaped head. Who knew?!
I’m not telling you this for sympathy. It’s context. It probably explains why I have very little patience for wasting time, polishing the wrong thing (once again, I had another expression in mind) or pretending a problem isn’t there because it’s easier.
If you’re going to trust me to get this close to your business, challenge what isn’t working, spot what you may be too close to see and help decide what happens next, you should probably know who you’re letting in.
brand strategy & marketing direction // the recovery archives
01 // let’s skip the five-year plan.
02 // from nuclear fission to sharp instincts.
After that, I spent 13 years keeping the daily logistics of a secondary school moving. Eighteen hundred kids, two hundred staff, one master calendar and zero room for error. Tears and tantrums were a daily occurrence. Genuinely, that was usually just the staff.
When it’s 8:27am on a Monday morning and the entire system goes down, you get very good at working out what matters first, what can wait and what is about to cause absolute carnage if nobody deals with it.
That way of thinking never left me. It’s still how I work now. What really matters first? What goes on the backburner for the mo? What needs sorting before it grows legs and becomes a much bigger problem? Pretty pictures and good intentions will only get you so far. The bones have to be right.
My career started at British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, followed by Procter & Gamble Health & Beauty Care in London. Two very different worlds, but both taught me how much thought sits behind a business that looks like it knows exactly what it’s doing. That stuck.
From London, life took us over the water to Belgium, where we started a family and I studied interior design. Back in the UK, we renovated properties of our own and I worked in a local interior design gallery. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I developed a borderline obsession with balance, proportion and the tiny details that make something feel right before you can quite explain why.
Coming out the other side of cancer changed what I was prepared to put up with. Time-wasters, pointless noise, people and situations that take far more than they give, all had to go. And spending months talking about doing something when everybody already knows what needs doing.
The funny thing is, most of us spend our lives saying there aren’t enough hours in the day. We run around like blue-arsed flies trying to fit everything in. Yet somehow we still assume there’ll be another day. Another month. Another year. Plenty of time to do the thing, change the thing, leave the thing or finally start the thing.
The uncomfortable truth is, none of us actually knows how much time we’ve got. (Christ! we're getting deep here.)
‘Later’ stopped sounding like a plan.
Sounds brutal. Probably because it is, but it also made me look properly at what I’d actually been doing for years.
People had always come to me with their businesses, their ideas, the thing that wasn’t working or the thing they couldn’t quite see. I’d pull it apart, spot what felt off, ask the awkward questions and usually come up with another three ideas while I was at it.
Flossie & Locke brought all of that together. Brands. People. Logistics. Judgement. Commercial common sense. That instinct for knowing when something feels right and when something is very obviously wrong. And, if I’m honest, I’d also had enough of watching the obvious get buried under noise, process and corporate shite.
By then, the penny had finally dropped. This was the work I should have been doing all along.
And that’s the one thing I’ll tell you whether we ever work together or not. If there’s something you already know you need to do, don’t sit on it for another year waiting for the perfect time. Get off your arse and do it.
03 // when reality checks in.
04 // so, are we a fit?
So, the big question: do we fit? Because we have to. I’m honest, open, have a dry Northern delivery, a fairly wicked sense of humour and absolutely no ability whatsoever to tell you something’s working when it blatantly isn’t.
What am I actually good at? A sharp eye, commercial common sense and a brain that refuses to leave a loose thread alone.
You know your business from the inside. I look at it from where your customer is standing. When you’re buried in the day-to-day, it’s surprisingly easy to stop noticing the things they notice straight away. What’s clear. What’s confusing. What feels worth the money. What makes them hesitate. And what’s genuinely brilliant but somehow buried. That’s usually where I come in.
I ask awkward questions. I notice inconsistencies. I usually have another three ideas before we’ve finished talking about the first one. And I’m very good at working out where we need to start.
And yes, social media can be a big part of it.
I’m qualified in social media management and I genuinely love the thinking behind it. Content planning, campaigns, bouncing ideas. Working out what we need to talk about, why anybody should care and how it fits with what the business is actually trying to sell.
I can build the content calendar, come up with the campaigns, plan what needs creating and work with you on the ideas, shot lists and direction so you get the right material in the first place.
What happens next depends on what the business needs. It might be the positioning, the message, the next few months of marketing, a campaign or that offer you’ve been meaning to rethink for ages. Sometimes it’s planning a shoot, improving the customer route or directing changes to the website. Sometimes it’s spotting an opportunity everybody else has breezed straight past.
It might be one thing. It might be a few. We work out what the business actually needs and start there.
What I don’t want to spend my month doing is churning out twelve Canva graphics because some package says you’re due twelve Canva graphics.
That isn’t me saying social media doesn’t matter. Quite the opposite. If social is one of the places your customers are paying attention, then it needs proper thought behind it.
The same goes for the website. If it needs changing, I’ll tell you what needs changing and why. If we need a photographer, designer, developer or somebody with a skill I don’t have, I’d rather bring in the right person and direct the job properly than pretend I suddenly became a web developer overnight.
That’s really the point of the ongoing work. I stay close enough to the business to know what’s coming up, what needs talking about, what needs selling, what customers are responding to and where there’s an opportunity we'd be daft to ignore.
Some months that might mean social media takes centre stage. Another month it might be a campaign, a new offer, a website change, a shoot, an event or something nobody saw coming three weeks ago. The work follows what's actually going on in the business.
If what you want is someone to take instructions, build you a website and churn out posts every week without ever questioning whether any of it is doing a bloody thing, we’re probably not going to be a good fit.
But if you want someone who knows your business inside out, has your back, keeps an eye on what’s coming next and will still tell you when your latest idea is absolute pants, pull up a chair.