Dama Dama
A decade running the brand, commercial campaigns and creative direction across the lifecycle of the independent record label I co-founded
I co-founded Dama Dama in 2015 and ran the brand for a decade, through a Ninja Tune subsidiary partnership, a merchandise and events business, and a tactical wind-down in 2025.
Brief
An independent label to support friends' music projects.
That was the whole purpose in its origin. Get the music heard, form genuine connection with the fans, keep creative ownership with the artists, don't behave like a major-label imprint, run release parties and learn it by doing it.
Insight
Labels weren't distributors anymore, they were cultural platforms.
Streaming had taken care of distribution, and catalogue had stopped being a moat. What an audience still wanted was taste, someone to tell them what was worth their time. So we ran Dama Dama as a point of view with a catalogue attached: the aesthetic, the community, the feeling of being a part of something real. That was the product, the records were the output.
Build
Brand, campaigns, creative direction and commerce for ten years.
The identity was earthy, natural, mystical and textured - Dama Dama is latin for the type of deer that roams the countryside i’m from. This aesthetic held across record sleeves, merch, event identity and digital for the ten years. Every release was a campaign: I directed the artwork designers and photographers, co-ran the channels, and built the editorial and social media around each record. Through the Ninja Tune partnership I built brand systems that survived enterprise-tier expectations without losing the independence underneath, and through the growth years a Shopify store selling vinyl, merchandise and curated lifestyle pieces. Press and radio plugging was part of it too, landing the artists multiple BBC Radio 6 Music plays.
Where I learned the commercial side.
A decade of release campaigns, an online store, and a business to keep standing. Stock, margin, checkout, conversion, cash, and what a campaign actually returns. Not just the design of it, the running of it, which is the reason that today I read a client's funnel the way their finance director does.
