38 Monday April 4 2022 | the times
Business
alongside junior staff. This helps to
avoid bullying from demanding
clients, which she said was par for the
course in her old agencies.
The agency’s accounts include
George Cleverley, the Mayfair-based
shoemaker, and Republique, the
Singapore-based digital fashion brand
that creates cybergarments for
avatars and operates entirely in the
metaverse.
Indeed, it’s here that savvy
interventions can make a big
difference in the real world, such as
an April Fool social media campaign
for the Yorkshire-based Bottled
Baking Co, which sells pre-weighed
baking ingredients. “We pretended to
launch a baking mix for dogs and
were inundated with messages from
dog owners and stockists asking
where they could purchase it, so a
new product line, now known as
Doggy Baking, was created. It’s now
shortlisted for the Gift of the Year
2022 and is available in Fenwick. I
think it helped that so many people
were buying puppies in the
pandemic.”
Good timing again, perhaps, but
also the work of someone who knows
what they are doing.If you think running an ad
agency is a tough task...
H
aving had to contend with
her mother’s suicide and
the toughest of
upbringings in Northern
Ireland, starting a digital
marketing agency at the height of the
pandemic was never going to faze
Anya McKenna.
With lower overheads than itscounterparts in London, the
Cheltenham-based Hexe Digital’s
affordable rates chimed with a
number of small start-ups having to
“restrategise or fold” as physical retail
shut down and digital channels
became a main route to customers.
“It was about using the affordable
social media platforms available to
sell and promote and, with monthly
retainers starting as low as £500, we
saw good growth very quickly,”
McKenna, 31, said. Momentum was
bolstered by referrals and larger
clients including Giant, the global
bicycle maker.
“We’ve just taken on our first
international client, a French IT
business, and are turning over around
£20,000 a month. I’d love to say that
my business acumen was such that I’d
foreseen this, but it is more down to a
willingness to take a chance and
being brave enough to leave the
agency I was in... and pure luck.”
If her first entrepreneurial foray
seems straightforward, what came
before was a marked contrast. She
had been a “shaking and crying mess”,
burnt out from the toxic culture of
London advertising agencies rife, she
says, with chauvinism and bullying.
The aim with Hexe was to establish
an antidote to those workplaces.
The tipping point was the reaction
to the scars on her arms from when
she used to self-harm. “I’d been a top
performer, but suddenly I was treated
differently, perceived as emotionally
unstable and finally asked to leave for
no real reason. I knew there had to be
something better than being made to
feel this way.”
The scars in question were a legacy
of a troubled and chaotic childhood
that started as soon as she was born,
suffering withdrawal symptoms from
a heroin-addicted mother whose
mental health problems would end in
suicide when McKenna was 21.
Being of mixed-race and a Roman
Catholic growing up in the Protestant
coastal town of Portstewart in the
1990s resulted in daily abuse. She
recalls trying to dodge gangs of
school bullies by taking short cuts
through other people’s back gardens,
all to get back to a home that had
become the local drug den because of
her mother’s habit. Stints in foster
care and her own dabble with drink
and drugs followed, a downward
spiral that ended after she was
arrested for stealing a packet of Jaffa
cakes: “Of all the bloody things. I
didn’t even like them.”
Fortunately, her aunt and uncle
took her to live with them in
Aberdeen, where she resumed her
education, which had dwindled to
8 per cent attendance. From there she
went on to study business economics
with marketing at the University of
Dundee, a spell of normality that was
ruptured by her mother’s suicide.
“I remember her messaging me
shortly beforehand asking if I would
look after the cat if she had to go
anywhere. I really had no idea what
she was talking about: you never
think it’s going to happen.”
She said that the tragedy had
informed her entire business ethos.
“When you’ve been through what I’ve
been through you can’t be judgmental... No matter how big Hexe gets, we
don’t tolerate egos and always
prioritise kindness.” In practical
terms, that means adopting a largely
flat team structure where she works
Business Times Enterprise Network
T
enterprise
network
recruitment
Anya McKenna’s past
troubles, including her
mother’s suicide, drive
her business values,
Caroline Bullock writes