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  • Writer's pictureDaniel Marrable

Reflections on a mammoth year at 448 Studio

Holiday Time - 2021 in review

As I start to pack up and finish off my final checklist for the year I feel the best way to wrap up - what has easily been the busiest time for our company - is to start at the beginning and try to piece together a timeline of key events that shaped our direction. To put things into perspective we went from a team of 2 at the end of 2020, to a team of 20+ based in 4 countries in 12 months.


Let’s start at the beginning

January

  • Straight into it with negotiations to acquire event platform Forumm

February

  • 448 Studio officially brings Forumm into the fold. 448 expands from 2 to 7 with Murray, Junaid, Alex, Cameron and Eric coming on board

448 Studio logo and Forumm logo

March

  • Forumm founder Eric Kim named as 448 Studio COO

  • Plans begin with Junaid to build an in-house team of developers located in Pakistan

April

  • First truly international online conference takes place on Forumm, Association Montessori Internationale AGM with individuals from over 50 countries attending

  • We expand the team again to support UCAS on their social media plan for Clearing

  • We appoint six board of advisor members

  • Work begins on our SMART innovation grant application to develop a hybrid lecturing tool

Screengrab of a tweet with people running a broadcast

May

  • Dr Hilary Young joins the team in a consultant capacity to support the Academic Social Media programme with University of Leeds.

June

  • All Day All Night (our 24 hour live conference) hosted on our very own Forumm platform

July

  • After multiple false starts due to Covid restrictions Junaid finally heads to Pakistan to build our 448 Technology Team

  • We make the decision to close down our social media advertising service

August

  • 448 Studio announced as official Bantshire University partner

  • Dr Hilary Young joins our team full time and begins work on LSE blog strategy project

  • We say goodbye to Laura our first 448 team member who is offered an amazing social media job working for Scottish Television


September

  • 448 Technology team fully operational under the guidance of Junaid with office space and 8 full time developers based in Islamabad

  • Outbound sales process begins

  • Samwise turns 4

October

  • GCC hosts their second Virtual Graduation on Forumm

  • Dave Cowan joins the team as our Head of Marketing and Brand

November

  • Packed with hybrid style events like Net Native’s Think Student Live, and Pickle Jar’s ContentEd

December

  • Social media intern Ellie joins the team to work with Hilary

  • Digital Development Loan final submission which ties into plans for our 448 Cloud servers to power further growth and expansion in 2022

Selfie of 4 guys in the office with a little christmas tree

What 448 Studio looks like right now


In order to keep everything organised and workflows as efficient as possible (especially working in different locations) we’ve had to segment 448 four service areas plus a product. This doesn't mean team members don't work together, far from it, it just helps us structurally know what each team member is doing on a day-to-day basis.


448 Studio

  • Sales for both services and products

  • Marketing, branding and website

  • Vision and people

  • All Day All Night social media conference