Stephen Brown treats mat leave as a measuring stick. The CEO of Fuse Create says they help validate just how far the agency has come within a short period of time. “People come back from mat leave and go, ‘Woah.’ Because they have a year gap, they come back and a few of them have said, “This is a very different company.”

In the Spring of 2020, the agency then-known as Fuse Marketing Group was gearing up to re-introduce itself as a creative-first shop. It was a big change for the 18-year-old, discipline-led agency, which has typically kept its creative services separate from its experiential expertise, offered under the Fuse Live banner.

With the help of Steve Miller – then a year into his role as partner, VP and ECD – Fuse had undertaken a lot of planning and behind-the-scenes work, including a new name, vision and branding by Jacknife that would help turn the heads of new and existing clients.

“We made the decision to radically change the product of Fuse, and the reputation of Fuse, and the culture of Fuse,” Brown says. “We were in the planning stages. And we pulled the trigger early in the pandemic, because we were like, ‘We’re not going to let this stop us.’”.

It wasn’t easy, Brown adds, but Fuse stuck to its guns and followed through with the relaunch, a decision he says is “paying off in strides right now.”

One of the biggest changes was Fuse’s decision to encourage everyone, from account and project managers through IT and the CFO, to adopt a creative – as opposed to a profit-driven – mindset, says Miller. “The creative department might come up with the creative, but it’s the agency that has to champion [the approach].”

Previously, ideas flowed through the agency like a waterfall, moving from one department to the next like an assembly line “without people really being engaged or collaborative throughout,” Miller says. That, too, has changed. Team members now travel down the assembly line together, remaining involved in every step of the process until the work is brought to market, he says.