Looking Back On 2021
It feels like an awfully long time since I’ve written one of these! And in all honesty, I’m not sure what this blog is going to be about, but after a frantic end to the year I wanted to take some time to reflect on FOSTER Studios’ second year of existence.
When 2021 started, I can’t deny that I was a bag of worry and apprehension about what the road ahead had in store for the business. Launching the company a matter of months before the pandemic and to have no work for so long, to then claw it back in the second half of 2020 only to be greeted with yet another lockdown at the start of this year was just… Well, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how it felt. It’s a feeling that resonated with 90% of business owners.
However, just a week or so into January, the restrictions did not appear to be the stumbling block that I believed they would be. Although social activities were very much limited, work that physically could not be done from home was still allowed to go ahead and with FOSTER Studios very much falling into that category, it was a delight to see how many businesses still wanted to work with us throughout the early part of the year. We started things off with two rather large projects, creating promotional films for local organisations, Crystal Collections and Sharp Skips.
We were then very fortunate in February to work on a campaign with the Department for Education, capturing video and photography content to promote the reopening of schools across the country. From that point, as everything very gradually started to reopen, things started to become a bit steadier for us. One of my personal highlights this year has been working with the amazing Hamleys of London, and although we worked with them before in October 2020, our ongoing relationship really stemmed from capturing their reopening in April of this year.
In a way it almost feels like the year has been in split in 2 given that ‘Freedom Day’ came on the 19th July and I’m grateful to say that these past five months have been the best of my career. Whenever the workload gets too heavy, it always helps to think back to those times when it looked like there would be no work at all. I think the thing that’s gotten me most excited about the future is just how many new clients we took on this year and what that hopefully will mean moving forward. Although we don’t have any clients on retainer, we do have such a great network which is arguably more valuable than depending on only a few regular clients for income.
I’m not going to ramble on any further, but I will just say how immensely grateful I am to be in a position where I can call this my full-time job, working on my own terms, with businesses that value what FOSTER Studios does.
As much as I want to end on a positive, you can’t help but look at the current COVID-19 situation without feeling some sort of anxiety about it. Just like every other business, year three for FOSTER Studios is going to be presented with more challenges, but hopefully a lot more successes along the way.
