Felicity Haylock and the Creative Marketing Co.
Article by Clara Gratwick
On your first scroll through the Creative Marketing Co. website and Instagram, you feel an immediate warmth. It’s not just in the colour palette, but in the brightness of the words and the smile on Felicity Haylock’s face that convey the belief that you (humble small business owner) are capable of something great.
Felicity describes Creative Marketing Co. as her other baby – a baby she’s been nurturing for the past three and a half years. Her passion for marketing stems back to working for her dad’s business, Uncle Pete’s Toys in Dubbo, when she was just 14. She reminisces on her job there with a smile, “I thought I ran the show. I did all the marketing – we would do advertisements on the radio and I would write the script. I ran his social pages and I installed flyers, promotions and signage. Anything that needed to be written, I wrote.”
After studying a Bachelor of Commerce at UNSW and then lecturing in marketing at Bathurst, Felicity knows marketing. But it is her passion for words and small business that truly makes her special.
Felicity says words have helped her through life’s hurdles. “At 23, I was exactly where I wanted to be. Then life happened and things got really messy.” Felicity was juggling full- time work and study, an honours thesis, running marathons, state netball umpiring and suffering from understandable burnout. So she left Sydney, travelling back to Dubbo to recover while she worked in her Dad’s toy shop. Felicity left Sydney, her honours thesis, marathons, umpiring state netball, working full-time and studying full-time and flew back to her hometown of Dubbo to get better and worked in her Dad’s toy shop to pass the time.
Despite the move though, Felicity struggled to slow down. “In typical Felicity style, I was doing 80-hour weeks at the toy shop.” After four months of this, she became manic and erratic. “I would go for runs in the middle of the night. I would jump off fridges because it sounded fun. I would do really impulsive things,” she says. When her mum took her to the GP, Felicity was asked to step out of the room and the doctor told her mother, “Your daughter is in the middle of a manic episode. She has bipolar type one and I’m going to hospitalise her.” Instead, Felicity’s mum took carers leave to look after her.
Felicity recalls that she was often sedated and lethargic. “I was a different person and I hated myself. It took four years to emerge from that.”
Felicity had to start from scratch, working at a level her brain could manage. While working at a café, she was asked to play with their social media. She recalls, “I did some caption writing for the cafe and I was like, ‘Oh, I love this’. I felt like I was coming back – I was getting well again.” Later, working as a disability support worker, she started running the company’s social media as well. Two weeks in, her boss came to her and said, “Fliss, you can’t be a disability support worker anymore; you are an amazing marketer.” That was the birth of the Creative Marketing Co.
Felicity’s business is a point of immense pride and the joy comes from doing what she loves and helping small businesses thrive. “I was working with a small business in Narromine and one week she and the owner came to me and said, “I can’t do our meeting this week because I’ve just been inundated with clients from social media.” Felicity shares this with a smile.
From her first Zoom call with clients, Felicity is interested in learning about the individual she is working with. She writes with them in mind and their voice comes through in the copy. In expertly crafting the words, she also adds what she refers to as Felicity-isms – a term her honours supervisor coined for her unique writing style.
Felicity offers social media planning and management, website copy and a friendly chat on all things words. In her own words, she’ll have a crack at writing anything.
“I effectively lost my mind, but my writing was still there,” she shares. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got better, but I knew it would have something to do with words.”
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