WHEN the advertising agency Mother moved offices two months ago, staff found a novel use for the centrepiece of its former London home — a caravan that had been parked in the foyer. To tell clients about their move, they carved up the caravan and sent pieces, such as bits of the lino floor, in a mailout headlined: “Your very own piece of advertising heritage.”

At Mother, an independent that is one of the fastest growing ad agencies in the UK, the focus is on branding. The directors talk about their agency in advertising-speak, describing it as a “brand” that clients such as Orange, Coca-Cola and Egg have bought into. Even an office move presents a chance to promote that brand.

Mother is an agency of its time. Its directors say that an independent would not have gained such notable clients 20 years ago, when large advertisers were unwilling to venture beyond global networks such as J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather (now part of WPP).

But, in recent years, many advertisers have shown a tendency to shop for agencies outside the major networks. Coca-Cola last year awarded Mother, which already worked on its Schweppes and Dr Pepper brands, its prize account, the Coca-Cola brand in the UK, long held on a global basis by McCann-Erickson.

“This certainly isn’t the end of the networks, (but) it is the beginning of meritocracy,” proclaims Stef Calcraft, one of the five British partners at Mother. “It used to be you had hotshops on the one hand and then you’d have big lumbering business agencies, which were a safe pair of hands. There was nothing in the middle.”

Mother, initially renowned as a creative hotshop, has taken that middle ground. Its position was cemented when it won the Boots account last December. The retailer spends about £90 million a year on advertising.

Mother moved to Shoreditch in February, having outgrown its Clerkenwell office. Established in 1996 to work on the launch of Channel 5, Mother employs more than 100 staff and recently opened its second office, in New York. The trade magazine Campaign says Mother is the 17th largest agency in the UK, with accounts worth about £100 million in billings last year. It has been the subject of takeover approaches, including one from Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP.

But Mother is resolutely independent, says Andy Medd, another partner. Its private ownership allows it to be accountable only “to ourselves and our clients”. The agency’s work, Medd suggests, does not have to be “compromised” by an imperative to earn profits for a parent company.

Calcraft and Medd talk in abstract terms about subjects such as creativity, brand values, ideas and ideal ways to run an advertising business. Even in an industry that specialises in hyperbole, Mother has a reputation for talking the talk. It’s often difficult to get a word in, as the partners bounce ideas off each other.

They explain that the agency works to a “holy trinity” of values: “Do the best work we possibly can, make a living and have fun”, prioritised in that order. But even if they talk (and talk) the talk, Mother’s directors can argue that, with the agency’s client list, they walk the walk too.

The agency likes to be seen as different from any other. It is well known for not employing “suits”, meaning account managers. Mother says that suits are unnecessary “gobetweens” who create a buffer between clients and the agency’s creative staff. This flattened structure keeps costs down, too. “If we were conventionally structured we would be twice as big,” Calcraft says.

“We are making very, very good margins. We make good money, but money that we earn. It’s a tight business, (but) we pay our people well.”

The agency has also been recession-proof, Medd says, growing at least 20 per cent each year during the recent downturn. “When WPP stands up and says the market is now growing by 2.5 per cent, fine,” he says. “They live in a different market to us. We live in a marketplace where we simply seek any ambitious clients.”

Not that Mother’s growth has been trouble-free. It worked for ITV Digital, creating the famous Monkey character, but it failed to halt the channel’s collapse.

“It nearly bankrupted us,” Medd says. “We had two decisions: we could fire half the people who worked for us or we could say we will actually hold our breath, eat into the money that we have made and we’ll come through. And we did. We didn’t lay anyone off and we stuck to our guns and went out there and found new pieces of business.”

And although it won such notable accounts as Boots and the Coca-Cola brand last year, Mother parted company with Interbrew’s Hoegaarden and Castlemaine XXXX beers and Campbell’s Super Noodles.

Mother opened in New York last November, an ambitious move for a comparatively small agency. It maintains, however, that the US presents similar openings to the UK. “The opportunity to behave like we have behaved here is the same there,” Medd says.

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