Head of creative agency, Headjam, Luke Kellett began his career in photography in the UK before the lure of the Hunter Region drew him here.

Headjam produces design solutions for businesses and projects through a multi disciplinary approach in the areas of education, health, community and the arts.

He is inspired by those who look to creative concepts to effect positive change.

• What led you to where you are now?

I have quite a mixed background in terms of the creative industries and management, but initially I started out as a photographic assistant in the UK working for some fantastic portrait and fashion photographers, so that is my background in production.

It was through that assisting and production I met, my now wife, Sarah – who is my business partner at Headjam. She is originally from Newcastle and we started working together producing multi discipline projects instead of just photographic ones.

• What motivates and drives you?

Probably the biggest driving element for me is working with a team of people, so working holistically on projects to solve problems and provide real world outcomes for those problems. A key example of that is understanding why we’re trying to do a particular project and what the outcomes will be, as opposed to just producing something that is ascetically pleasing.

• Why did you decide to start your own business?

I think collaborating on creative projects with Sarah and our greater team, it became really apparent that if we provided a hub and had a multi disciplined team that we could essentially look after and provide wages for and bring projects in, we would be able to cultivate a really great creative community that could be working on projects for a longer term and collaboratively we could produce better outcomes together.  So really it’s driven by an outcome focus with our work and really looking at how we can build a hub and have responsibility for that hub.

• Where would you like to be in 10 years?

Probably in 10 years the really important thing to note about myself and Headjam is we choose to work in four key sectors – health, education, community and arts. For us, continuing to collaborate in these four sectors is really, really important.

So the primary difference to where we want to be in a decade’s time is producing possibly larger campaigns on a national or international stage where we are really still looking at elements that we do at the moment locally and state-wide of behavioural change and increasing population change in a positive way, whether that is working on a mental health awareness campaign or working with a community organisation to help communicate their message.

• What local businessperson do you look up to?

I think locally I have been very blessed to meet a key individual in my life called Mike Preston who is a creative director originally from the UK. We have been very fortunate to be able to collaborate with Mike over the last couple of years in our capacity as creative directors of Headjam.  One of the key reasons why I look up to Mike and have a lot of aspirations for him is the choices he has made with his ability and skill sets to work on advocacy within mental health, and really take his creative concepts and ideas to impact positive change within the Australian and international communities as a whole.

*Note – Since this interview Mike has joined the ownership team of Headjam, read more here.