Company: Harpswood
Founder and Managing Director: James Clench
Website: https://www.harpswood.com/
About Harpswood
Harpswood started in April 2020, so our first challenge was fairly obvious: we launched into a pandemic. But we also started with an extraordinary opportunity when Octopus Energy became our founding client.
Our founder, James Clench, has now advised Octopus for nearly a decade and the Harpswood team has helped tell its story from ambitious startup to global, multibillion-pound energy company. Along the way we have helped establish Octopus founder Greg Jackson as one of Britain’s best-known business leaders. We secured his appearance on Desert Island Discs, the gold standard of personal profile PR. His controversial BBC CEO Secrets interview, “My billion-pound company has no HR department”, was read more than two million times in 48 hours. In 2023, Octopus asked us to take our model overseas and we launched Harpswood US.
That journey sums up what we want Harpswood to be: an agency that has impact and grows with its clients. We love working with ambitious startups early, understanding what makes them different and helping build the profile they need as they scale. We have worked with some of the UK’s most exciting tech-for-good startups and scaleups in sectors including energy, climate, space, healthcare, education and technology.
James spent 16 years as a journalist, including as Head of News at The Sun, before PR. He believes in the power of clear and precise language, and that is reflected in Harpswood’s work. We hire former journalists alongside brilliant PR people, obsess over what makes something genuinely interesting and avoid jargon. Our ability to turn a great idea into an engaging media story matters to the founders we work with.
We also think agencies should have an impact beyond the clients that pay them. We work pro bono with the Social Mobility Foundation, helping campaign for a fairer society. Our work has brought its research and young people’s stories onto BBC Radio 4 Today, BBC Business Today, BBC Radio 5 Live, LBC and into publications including The Guardian and Bloomberg.
That work is particularly important now as Britain confronts the challenge of hundreds of thousands of young people being outside education, employment or training. Good communications will not solve that problem, but they can make sure the people experiencing it are heard and that evidence reaches the people with the power to act. We’ve also hired interns through the Social Mobility Foundation and tried to open the doors of an often exclusive industry to young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
Six years after launching in a pandemic, Harpswood has grown significantly, but the principle has stayed the same: work with good people, get great results and make a difference.
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