Confronting creative career change: Natalie Prout, Strategy Partner, on the Design Next podcast

Natalie Prout is an experienced strategist who left an enviable agency role to build something entirely her own. A brave move, from somebody who champions brave thinking in all she does. This episode of our podcast covers ambition, ambiguity, parenthood, strategy, and why staying the same is far riskier than changing…

At the start of the year, Nat founded Mischief Maker, a branding agency made to misbehave, shifting from a senior strategy role at JKR into a her own independent studio, which she founded this year with Vini Vieira. With no one to say no to her goals, Nat had to get ‘comfortable with ambiguity’, making decisions that “might not be the right decision, but… feel like the right decision for now.”

The contrast with JKR is stark; she calls her time there “one of the best kind of moments career wise for me”. There, she worked with multiple strategists, building teams, partnering with huge clients and making constant calls. Now she’s pitching (against up to 16!!!!! agencies. That number of exclamation marks is justified here), fighting for creativity, and rebuilding belief in what strategy can do.

“It feels like changing languages.”

Essential to Nat’s career journey is growth in many aspects; personal, professional, uncomfortable growth. “If you’re not growing, you’re not staying relevant,” she says, and starting a studio was the one frontier she hadn’t crossed. But the biggest shift of all wasn’t career-related: it was becoming a parent. She describes the moment her first child arrived as ‘pulling the handbrake up’, forcing her to learn new boundaries, delegate, and think differently in every way. Nat is the second person on our podcast who says becoming a parent has made them better at their job.

She’s passionate about creative people having multi-hyphenated lives – as in, side projects, passions, communities, networks – because without them, you’re way more vulnerable to losing your spark. Protecting your identity outside of work makes you better inside of it.

As the market tightens, Nat reflects on how hard it is for small studios to compete – and she’s honest that she may, probably, have to step away from the studio she has created. Why? So it can become what it needs to be. The ultimate learning: for Nat, change now feels comfortable, and she believes everybody, industry-wide, must embrace that spirit too.