Calendar King focuses on all-purpose

Oct 8 2008 by Alistair Houghton, Liverpool Daily Post

Alistair Houghton meets MEL GRUNDY, head of marketing house Oakbase

THE marketing industry has its critics, but former glamour photographer Mel Grundy isn’t one of them.

Grundy, who was one of the UK’s leading rugby league photographers before becoming the “Calendar King” who produc-ed the first-ever glamour calen-dar from behind the Iron Cur-tain, has seen his photography studio transformed into all-purpose marketing house, Oakbase.

Grundy has long left his camera behind and has led Oak-base, which turns over more than £6m, into one of the North West’s biggest advertising agencies.

Its campaigns included the award-winning series of adverts for TJ Hughes featuring celebrity relatives including Wayne Rooney’s brother. Other clients include Ireland’s largest house-builder McInerney Homes, German chemicals giant BASF, CRB and passport office operator Capita, and catering equipment supplier Bunzl Lockhart.

The firm, which also boasts in-house photography, print production and media buying departments, is now expanding its PR and online operations.

Straight-talking Grundy says he will not make any rash predic-tions about what the future might hold, but says his company is bidding to win new clients to help it through the downturn.

He said: “I’d love to say I know what’s going to happen, but I don’t. The bankers are a lot brighter than me and they don’t know.

“We’re becoming more aggres-sive. We have to be. It’s a new business drive because we know our clients are not spending as much and we know we might lose one or two along the way. It’s rough. It’s no good saying it isn’t.

“Luckily, Oakbase has a good cross-section of work. That’s the secret in advertising.”

Grundy was born in Warring-ton and, after studying at the town’s technical college, became a Rugby League photographer, supplying pictures to all the national newspapers. But one day at Wembley made him change his vocation.

“I got a massive drenching,” he said. “I just thought there have to be better ways of earning a living than this. I was on the aeroplane back to Manchester with water dripping down me and the cameras wet through.”

Grundy, who had already bought a studio in Chester, in-stead began taking Page Three pictures for the Daily Star, which moved printing to Manchester in 1980. The job, he says, was far less exciting than it sounds.

“It was more boring than the rugby,” he said. “It was like work-ing a Ford assembly line – one model comes in, click, in comes another.”

That work, however, kept his name in the papers and led him into a far more lucrative field – glamour calendars.

The calendars weren’t just about photography – Grundy also created the concepts and took charge of the design work, giving him experience that stood him in good stead when his company moved in a different direction.

He won his first job in a pitch against top London photograph-ers and flew to the Caribbean island of Grenada for what he thought would be a quiet start to a new business venture.

“We stayed in a beautiful house owned by Caterpillar bulldozers which had a grand piano on a patio,” Grundy recalls.

“But civil war broke out while we were there. They tried to blow up the Prime Minister. The explosions were ringing out.

“I thought we weren’t going to get out. We took two rolls of film from each shoot and buried them on ourselves, so we knew we’d get out with something. If they saw the bag with the film in, they’d probably think I’d got pictures of the attempted assassination.”

Despite that narrow escape, Grundy knew he’d found a niche – and the work started to flood in.

“I did the first glamour calen-dar to be shot behind the Iron Curtain,” he said. “I went with four models to Moscow, Lenin-grad and Kiev.

“With my journalistic back-ground, a lot of my concepts for calendars had news value. I was the first to photograph Sam Fox in 3-D. I finished up doing 10 calendars a year. That’s nine more than anyone else.”

Companies such as GKN and Pochin were snapping up his calendars, and he went “five times round the world” on shoots. But, by the 1990s, public opinion had changed and glam-our calendars lost popularity..

Grundy, however, already had an ace up his sleeve. His free-lance business, then called Creat-ive Associates, had already begun doing other completely different design work, including leaflets and point of sale products.

“The calendars helped me net-work and grow the business and I did other work for nearly every company I did calendars for.”

Soon, freelance designer Mike Dangerfield joined as director and the company began extend-ing its portfolio.

Grundy said: “This business was really an extension, apart from the camera, of what I was doing, concept and design work.”

It changed its name to Axys before a reverse takeover with Chester’s Whitefriars Advertis-ing that brought director Paul Mizon on board.

At first, the two companies were run separately, but eventu-ally they merged, finally creating the Oakbase of today.

The company’s biggest account remains TJ Hughes, the Liver-pool-based discount store chain that is seeing sales rise as con-sumers tighten their belts.

Oakbase’s best-known adverts for TJ Hughes featured celebrit-ies’ relatives, rather than the celebrities themselves.

“It was at the time when every TV ad had a personality on it,” said Grundy. “Their fees were going through the roof. We came up with the idea ‘we don’t spend your money on A-listers.’

“We had Wayne Rooney’s brother, Jonathan Ross’s mother, Carol Vorderman’s mother and Robbie Williams’s dad. We won five awards for that.”

Other Oakbase successes include advertising campaigns for bathstore.com which Grundy says helped that company grow from a £20m to a £90m turnover business in two years.

He said: “It’s an affordable product but we tended to go for up-market papers like The Times on the basis that most people who read the paper had two bath-rooms and most people who read The Sun had one.”

In the year before last, Oak-base’s turnover was £9.6m, but a decision was made to give up a £3m annual media buying con-tract as margins were too small. “That went but the profits didn’t drop a penny,” said Grundy.

Times are hard, but he says firms will need to advertise or customers will forget them.

alistairhoughton