Meet Sam Shrimpton: Why I Built Teylu for Disruptor Brands

Sam Shrimpton is the founder of Teylu and Partners. Over a fifteen plus year career in marketing he has designed, led and delivered programmes for brands like Ginsters, Audi, Red Bull, GoPro and so many more. He has helped more than 350 brands grow working in 48 countries to date. This is the story of why he built Teylu, what it stands for, and what ambitious founder led brands can expect when they work with him and the Teylu team.

The question that started Teylu

When clients ask me why I started Teylu, I tell them the truth. I got tired of watching brilliant brands pay seven figures for marketing work that could have been delivered better for a fraction of the cost because it was more agile and attentive to customer beahviour and problems. I got tired of watching ambitious founders get sold on glossy agency pitches that never survived first contact with their P&L.

I had spent over a decade inside the rooms where enterprise marketing budgets get signed off. Coca Cola. Levi's. Red Bull. Ralph Lauren. Bose. GoPro. Audi. Ginsters. Amazon. Google. I saw how global brands think, how they brief, how they measure, and how they scale. I also saw the gap. The gap between what enterprise agency teams deliver to enterprise clients, and what ambitious challenger brands can actually access when they come looking for the same quality of work.

That gap is the reason Teylu exists.

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Where my experience comes from

My career started the way most marketers' careers do, by accident. I picked up a brief I was not qualified to run, delivered something that worked, and kept being handed bigger ones. Over fifteen plus years I have led performance marketing for FMCG giants, built ecommerce programmes for retail brands shipping into forty eight plus countries, advised technology businesses on international market entry via B2B distribution partners, and helped heritage names rewire themselves for the digital age.

The numbers that matter most to me are the ones that sit on my clients' balance sheets as a result of storytelling and marketing impact across fiscal years. Across my career I have been directly responsible for delivering more than £31 million in tracked revenue for the brands I have worked with at Teylu alone, and have helped shape marketing programmes that have touched more than 350 brands across 48 countries with my amazing team. The average client relationship I have held runs to 3.2 years at Teylu, which in this industry is a meaningful number. Most agency retainers do not make it past eighteen months.

I am not interested in being the agency partner you work with for a quarter and replace. I am interested in being the partner you work with for the run.

What enterprise marketing actually taught me

The real lesson from inside enterprise marketing is not that the work is harder. It is that the work is more honest. When you are spending multimillion pound budgets against a quarterly earnings call, nobody has time for theatre. You have to know what moves the number. You have to know what does not. You have to have the discipline to cut the things that are not working, even when the agency pitching them is clever and likeable.

That discipline is the single most valuable thing I carried out of those boardrooms. Challenger brands need it more than their enterprise counterparts do, because a challenger brand cannot absorb the cost of a wasted quarter. A global FMCG giant can run a campaign that underperforms and still hit its year. A founder led disruptor brand cannot.

Every Teylu engagement is shaped by that principle. We bring the enterprise playbook, and we apply it with the urgency of people who know what it feels like to watch cashflow depend on whether a landing page actually converts.

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Why Teylu exists

Teylu was founded in 2017 because I kept meeting brilliant founders who had been let down by the agency ecosystem. They were either being priced out of the enterprise scale agencies that would do the work properly, or they were being serviced by generalists who did not understand the difference between a vanity metric and a commercial one when it came down to the tough moments.

The structural problem in UK and international agency land is that the people who can actually deliver enterprise quality work are mostly trapped inside enterprise agencies that serve enterprise clients because of they have strong appeal - great salaries, exciting work, big teams. The overhead of those businesses, the layers of account management, the central London office costs, the margin stack, makes them inaccessible to the brands that need them most.

Teylu solves that by being architected from day one as a remote first agency. We do not carry the central office overhead. We do not charge clients for flashy fee justifiers and expensive real estate that other agencies bake into their rate cards. We hire senior specialists who have done the work at the highest level and we deliver it directly, without the management tax. That means I can attract the best talent, but letting them live wherever works for them, providing a better work life balance than my enterprise competitors.

It is a simple commercial model and it produces a simple result. Clients pay for results, not for invoice justification. We deliver more agile, impactful work in most cases than much larger agencies than us. We pride ourselves on being a beacon for the indepent agency landscape.

What Teylu stands for

Teylu means family in Celtic Cornish. That is not a marketing line. It is how we operate, internally and externally. When a client partners with Teylu they join a network of senior specialists, technology partners, media buyers, PR operators and creative teams who all move in the same direction for them. No finger pointing between three different agencies. No briefs lost in translation between four different suppliers. One team, one direction, one P&L owned outcome.

Our family of leading technology, agency and client partnerships means we can offer truly flexible marketing delivery and evolve with brands as they grow. When you buy a Teylu retainer you are not just buying our team. You are buying the reach of a network that has been built deliberately over a decade.

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The brands we work with now

The brands we work with today are the brands I wish I could have worked with earlier in my career more often. Disruptor retail names like Blake Mill who are rewriting category expectations with tailored product and tight commerce execution. International technology businesses like HMS Networks where marketing has to translate into pipeline across multiple territories and be highly optimised. Category creators like Left Field Kombucha who are building the grocery shelf of the next decade with natural produce to the highest standard. Outdoor brands like Timberplay who bring craftsmanship into a market that still rewards it and brings joy to children the world over.

These are the brands who wake up every morning playing against larger incumbents with bigger budgets. Teylu exists to close that budget gap by making the budget they do have work harder than the budget the incumbent is burning through.

How I still stay close to the work

I am not a founder who has drifted away from the practice. I still sit in client workshops. I still write marketing director level strategy documents. I still embed inside client businesses as a fractional marketing director when the brief is right - which means almost every project. That is a deliberate choice. The moment a founder stops doing the work is the moment the business starts drifting away from its original purpose. I believe in horizontal structure. I'm a doer. My team are all doers.

Our embedded marketing director consultancy is the service I am proudest of. It puts senior strategic leadership inside businesses that are not yet ready to carry a full time marketing director but cannot afford to be without one. For a founder running a £5m to £50m business, that combination of strategic oversight and executional backing is often the difference between staying stuck and breaking through to the next growth stage.

What I look for in a client

I am going to be honest about this because founders who read this blog will respect the honesty. We are not the right fit for everyone.

The clients who get the most out of Teylu are the ones who want a partner, not a supplier. Who treat their marketing investment as a growth engine rather than a cost centre. Who are comfortable being challenged when their own assumptions do not hold up against the data. Who measure success in commercial terms, not in vanity metrics.

If that sounds like you, we will probably work well together. If you are looking for an agency that will simply execute whatever you brief them without pushing back, we are probably not the agency for you. And that is fine. There are plenty of very good agencies who do that work. Teylu is built for the brands that want the push back. That want the challenge.

What is next for Teylu

We are investing heavily in two areas over the next twelve months. The first is deepening our international capability, particularly for UK brands looking to cross into EMEA and the USA markets. The second is expanding our embedded marketing director consultancy so that more founder led businesses can access senior leadership on a part time basis without the full time cost.

Both directions come from the same place. We believe the next decade of UK business growth will be led by disruptor brands who figure out how to scale without becoming the corporate bureaucracies they set out to disrupt. Teylu is built to help those businesses get there. We're embracing AI technology implementation with our AI Labs team launched in 2023 and making sure that our fractional marketing director consultancy delivers huge impact for clients installing the most efficient operational, analytical and marketing systems possible for the most competitive cost.

If you want to work with me

If you have read the Marketing Agency Hiring Guide and you are sizing up whether Teylu might be right for your next phase of growth, the best thing to do is book a thirty minute conversation with me directly. No pitch deck. No follow up sequence. Just a straight conversation about where you are, where you want to get to, and whether we are the right team to help.

If we are not the right fit, I will tell you, and I will point you at the agencies who are. That is the Teylu approach.

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About the author

Sam Shrimpton is the founder of Teylu and Partners. He has led marketing programmes for household names and more than 350 other brands across 48 countries. He founded Teylu in 2017 with the mission of bringing enterprise level marketing expertise to disruptor brands without the enterprise overhead. He writes regularly on agency hiring, marketing leadership, brand strategy and ecommerce optimisation. He is based between Cornwall, Birmingham and London.