THE COMMUNICATOR

There’s something fitting about the fact that Lisa Clarke named her strategic branding agency Rowdy Studio. Not because she is particularly loud or unruly.

She isn’t. But she does believe businesses sometimes need to be challenged, disrupted and pushed out of the comfortable identity they have outgrown.

“If you look it up, it’s boisterous and disruptive,” she tells me. “But that can also be a positive thing if you use it in the right manner.” 

That philosophy has taken Lisa from a young Dublin designer who found herself redundant during the 2008 recession to the founder of a 10-person strategic branding agency working across the UK and Ireland. Rowdy’s clients span technology, property, sport, investment and professional services.

The firm is hiring, but remains deliberately compact and senior. “We’re very successful as a tight unit,” she says. 

Lisa grew up on Dublin’s south side and studied visual communications before beginning her career as a junior designer.

After about three years, she moved to London in 2007, planning to gain experience and return home. Then the financial crisis hit and she was made redundant in 2008. 

Instead of waiting for another job, Lisa started asking what she could create herself. “How can I support myself? How can I use this as an opportunity?”

She tapped into her network in Ireland and the UK and began working independently, initially under the decidedly less rowdy name LD Designs. By 2010, she had found her market and formally launched Rowdy Studio. 

That willingness to compete was already well established. Lisa began representing Ireland in hockey at under-14 level, continued through the age groups and captained several teams.

Sport became particularly important because school did not always come as easily. Lisa is dyslexic and says she naturally gravitated towards creative subjects and athletics. 

Hockey gave her another arena in which to discover what she could do. “It really gave me the confidence to go through school with dyslexia,” she says.

“I’ve got all these other things I’m very good at.” She also learned how to read people, skills she later brought into working life. 

Lisa, now a mother of two boys, aged nine and five, is back representing Ireland at Masters level, alongside some women she played with internationally years ago.

There’s something wonderful about returning to an earlier version of yourself after building a company, career and family, and discovering she is still there. 

Rowdy today works primarily with businesses at an inflection point. They may have raised funding, completed a merger or acquisition, changed their offering or grown so quickly that their external identity hasn’t kept pace. 

Lisa describes it neatly: The business has become realised, but the brand hasn’t. 

“Brand is about reputation,” she says. “It’s not your logo and your colours. That’s just the assets of that.” Rowdy’s Brand Compass methodology examines tensions within a business and helps leadership teams determine where the organisation is now and where it intends to go.

Strategy and design are considered together, including the visual and verbal ways an organisation presents itself. 

For leaders, that distinction matters. Your brand is communicated through what you say, how you behave, what customers experience and whether the story you tell about yourself matches what other people actually see. Lisa puts it simply: “It’s not really about decoration; it’s about direction.” 

One example is Irish-founded CalypsoAI. Rowdy worked with the company to reposition and rebrand it as a category leader.

CalypsoAI was subsequently acquired by US cybersecurity company F5. Lisa recalls being told that the strength of the company’s brand was part of what first got it noticed. 

Lisa uses two words to describe her own leadership: “autonomy and curiosity”.

She hires experienced people and gives them room to do what she hired them to do.

“A company is only as good as the people in it,” she says. Her job is to bring together strong teams, give them space to create and encourage them to remain curious enough to get under the skin of businesses across sectors. 

Curiosity also matters with customers. Lisa says companies can convince themselves they understand their audience when, in reality, “sometimes we find it’s actually just them they’re basing it on”.

Effective articulation requires understanding how a company sounds, behaves and shows up to the people it hopes to reach. 

And then there’s AI. Lisa is pragmatic about its value. Rowdy uses it for research and some asset creation, and she sees efficiencies in automation. But she is less convinced technology can replace the strategic human work at the beginning of the branding process. 

“Brand is an emotional state,” she says. “It’s connecting with audience emotionally.” The harder questions remain profoundly human: What differentiates this business? What is authentic to it? And, as Lisa puts it, “What is the one single truth for that business?” 

Her final message to leaders is direct. “The power of brand should never be underestimated for a business,” she says. “I really believe brand is the catalyst to growth.” 

Sometimes, apparently, it pays to get a little Rowdy.