Powerful Women Interview Series: Claire Hutchings, Founder of Chime Shares Lessons She’s Learned in Business

An interview with Natalie Ruiz

As part of my Powerful Women series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Claire Hutchings, Founder of Chime. She says she helps agencies and consultancies increase the volume on their marketing strategy and content. I am so excited to share her story and insights!

Thank you so much for connecting with me and sharing your story. I’m so excited to get started!

Yay! Me too, thanks for having me.

Tell me about yourself and what you do professionally:

I run Chime Agency, a marketing agency for agencies. It may sound silly, but agencies are notoriously terrible at building their own brand, so we help them with marketing strategy through to the execution of content and campaigns.

How did you get into this?

I’ve spent my 15-year career working in consultancies and agencies as an in-house marketing manager. In May 2020 at the height of the pandemic, I was made redundant from a big networked agency where I was Head of Marketing (while on maternity leave with my second daughter). I finished my maternity leave and started freelancing in the autumn of 2020 and naturally ended up working with agencies — as it’s what I knew and where my network was. But over the course of 15 months, my freelance business grew to a point where I couldn’t service all my clients alone. I had the choice to keep it as a good freelance business for me but I loved the variety of work and wanted to see where I could take it. There was a real need and appetite in the industry for what I was offering so I made the decision to scale my freelance business into an agency by employing two people part-time in April 2022. We are now a team of five and have worked with more than 20 agencies in the past year helping them turn up the volume on their own marketing, content, and campaigns.

That is so interesting! What do you love about it?

I got into marketing because I love marketing. By working with agencies I get to talk about marketing all day, with people who are just as passionate about it. Our clients understand the value of marketing…