After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Red Bee Creative's Head of Design Jane Fielder reached out to Kyiv-based Creative Studio Twid to see how Red Bee could be supportive.

“I sent an email because everything was happening. I just wanted to reach out and see whether we could support somebody,” Fielder said during Promax's Festival of Virtual Content on Wednesday. “I thought it was interesting to go from a creative to another creative, to give them that sense of solidarity, the feeling that who they are now is what they're going to be in the future, and just reach out and show that the world cares.”

“It was really nice to receive the email from Jane. For me, it was really amazing to feel the support from an unknown person,” said Twid's Sasha Alymov. “It's like I got a friend from London and now I can share my thoughts about everything with them.”

“After having great conversations and feeling so mutually related to each other we decided to give our relationship a name. We called it ‘twinning' just like in the Second World War when towns started to twin with each other to support each other and to bring unity amongst different populations,” said Fielder, Red Bee's head of design. “ It's a modern version of that. It's one company to another, one creative agency to another creative agency, just twinning, learning from each other and supporting each other.”

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Together, Red Bee Creative and Twid began collaborating on projects together, including a pitch for the branding of the 2023 Eurovision song contest. Red Bee also brought Twid with them – via live link – to Ravensbourne College of Art to do a session and virtually meet the students.

“They're in a room with all the students talking about creativity, talking about where they find their sources of reference and what they felt about design. And it was just magical to watch all these students literally watching people just like them talking from Kyiv, talking about creativity. It stole everybody's hearts,” said Fielder.

After that, “we had a bit of fire in our bellies and we wanted to make twinning an initiative that every agency in the UK and the Ukraine could be part of,” said Red Bee's Charlotte Berman.

“We started at the very beginning. We wrote a strategy for the initiative and we established our three guiding principles that we would always stand by: Friendship, creativity and victory. Underpinning those three pillars is our strapline, which is ‘be a creative ally.' We also specifically needed agencies in the UK to understand quickly why they should twin.”

To recruit more ‘twins' and communicate those values, they created a website, Twin for Victory, as well as a LinkedIn group and page where creative agencies could come to look for their twin.

“It was really exciting to see Twid in action designing a brand identity for twinning and a beautiful logo that just captures their imagination, their creativity and how special this could be,” said Fielder.

The logo includes twin dots above the letter ‘i' in “Twinning,” and those are there for a reason. “This ‘i' is a letter that is unique to Ukraine and it actually perfectly symbolizes sort of the strength that Ukraine have in standing up to Russia,” said Berman. “But also the two dots just symbolizing those two people and those twins coming together is just really amazing synergy.”

As one might expect, “our color palette is primarily blue and yellow, obviously, for the Ukraine flag. But we also wanted to tap into those tones that are so commonly seen through emojis because we are a warm and friendly and communicative initiative,” Berman continued.

The effort has yielded new twinning relationships – UK-based PR agency Aurora has twinned with Oshva PR in Ukraine, while Ukrainian social agency has twinned with Wilderness in the UK.

“I can't wait until we can meet each other in real life, not on Zoom. I think maybe I will have some tears in my eyes,” said Alymov.

To watch this session, go to Promax's Content Library. Join us for the next three Wednesdays to hang out with fellow creatives while learning something new!