Talking Passions: The Duchess Empire

Whether they’re helping local independents find their voice on the web, throwing fabulous niche events or blasting their favourite music to crowds all over Bristol and Glastonbury, the Duchess Empire have certainly found a following in their self confessed favourite UK city, Bristol. Adam managed to catch up with Meg Pope and Frankie Wallington recently for a chat about their passion for all things media related.

Adam Chisman (TP). “As a young girls what did you want to be when you grew up and how did you get to where you are now?”

Meg Pope (M). “Until I was about eight I firmly believed that I was gonna be a mermaid, and then realised that that was probably not gonna happen. I’ve always wanted to do something a bit creative. I think I was quite inspired, when I was about ten, by changing rooms, and decided I wanted to be an interior designer, and I did follow that through for quite a while. I worked at a very well known department store as a trainee interior designer in my early twenties, then realised that retail was slowly killing me. A friend of mine was working in media at the time and they needed a receptionist, so I was like, yeah I can do that, and then quickly found out that I was a bit of an organisational fiend, I really liked organising parties, so ended up getting into events.”

Frankie Wallington (F). “So quite similar. I wanted to be a cat, then realised that you don’t grow up to be cats, you grow up to be people. I then decided that I was going to be a marine biologist, but I didn’t like seaweed and that might have caused a bit of an issue. Them later on I was like, well I’m going to be a world famous director, and went to uni and studied media production. It was all wicked, loved it, got a job at the BBC and was like, this is not good. It was really boring, a lot of standing around not doing very much.. I crashed a BBC car.. Laughs.. wrote it off, and thought, I think I’m gonna leave. Then I got a job a SIFT, which is where Meg worked as well. I was a few years ahead of her. I just happened to get the opportunity to work with this awesome lady who was doing SEO, and it was all by chance, I hadn’t even heard what SEO was at the time (search engine optimisation for those who are unsure). Got a job doing that, really liked it, and from there my digital love has just grown.” 

TP. “Amazing. Well let’s start with the digital marketing side of things, which I know you’re very passionate about. You work very closely with a lot of well loved Bristol businesses to ensure they stand out from the crowd. Can you talk me through the Duchess Media treatment and what digital marketing actually involves?”

F. “Well I think for us, because we’re so passionate about everything digital, and everything Bristol, the Duchess Media proposition is that we work with Bristol independents. We’re very much about cultivating that ‘Bristol loving’, because to us, Bristol is the best city in the world and we want to do everything that we can to push it. Bristol independents are one of the things that make this city such a great place, so we’re so passionate about them, and I guess we see ourselves as part of the team. We’re not an external agency, we like to get in there and become part of them. I guess we’re positioning ourselves as the marketing wing for independents that can’t necessarily bring in their own marketing team. That’s where we come in.”

M. “It was completely accidental how we got into it, because we started, probably about five years ago, doing events in Bristol. We were like, I wish somebody would do an event that involved burlesque, and cocktails, and live music, and vintage venues, so we actually approached the guys, Nathan and Jay who run Hyde & Co. group, which now owns the Milk Thistle, and we did an event in 2014 which was called Prohibition. We thought nothing of it, put on the event and when we went to pitch them for it they were like, ‘so how are you gonna fill this venue?’ And we were like, ‘social media!’ They said, ‘you’ve got no audience, how are you gonna do it?’ And we said, ‘we’ve got a plan!’ And we did this secret campaign where we built up an audience of about 700 people by saying very little, and then when we finally released tickets we sold out within a week. The event was great, a real success, and we did a few more of them after that. The guys came to us after and said, we want to talk to you about our marketing. We went into this meeting thinking they’re just gonna want a bit of consultancy, and they sat us down and said, we want you to manage all of our social media and digital marketing. I can clearly remember standing outside the steps by The Ox afterwards with Franks going, ‘mate, I think we need to start a business’. It all came about from there, and we’ve been really lucky because the guys from Hyde & Co. have got such a Bristol empire and have been so supportive, and off the strength of working with those guys it’s just gone from one thing to the next. We’ve picked up some wicked Bristol independent clients.”

TP. “Happy days. Who have you got on your books?”

M. “We’ve got a couple of smaller clients who are a little bit further out. We work with a lovely little independent bed company in Portishead called Portis-beds, which is the best name ever. We work with a lovely kitchen company who do really swanky kitchens called Valentino Kitchens, who are based out in Chew Magna. We’ve got Pizzarova who, we’re completely biased obviously, but they do some of the best pizza’s in Bristol. Burnt Soul, purveyors of the best lycra and catsuits in the whole of the world, I would say, but certainly the whole of Bristol. We’re working with lovely Tom from Foozie, who also does some wicked events in Bristol.”

F. “And then all the family lot. So Milk Thistle, Hyde & Co., Pata Negra, Bambalan, all the Ox’s. So yeah, it’s a really nice Bristol list that we’ve got going on.”

M. “We’ve ended up predominantly food and drink, which probably says more about us than it does about our clients.”

TP. “Well you also pair up to become the Duchess DJs and have played to crowds all over Bristol and as far as Glastonbury Festival for the last few years, and I know first hand how good you are. Can you tell me about your set at Glasto this year and how it feels when you play your favourite music out together?”

M. “It’s still ridiculous and completely surreal, isn’t it.”

F. “Yeah, this was the most surreal Glastonbury for us. We always do The Rumshack, part of The Common, and Steve Bedlam, who used to do the Bedlam raves runs the common, and he’s just the most amazing bloke ever, he sort of took us under his wing because he quite likes what we were playing. We do a lot of Caribbean influenced music, but all very bassy. So we’d always done The Rumshack, that’s like the home of Duchess DJ’s, and then this year we saw him and he was like, ‘what are you ladies doing tomorrow night about 8 ‘o’ clock?’..”

M. “Yeah, we were like, ‘nothing, why?’ And he said, ‘do you want to open The Temple?’ Frankie, before I’d even had a chance to open my mouth went, ‘YES, YES PLEASE!’ Afterwards we left and she was like, ‘mate, are you alright with that?’ And I was like, you’re asking me if I wanna open The Temple, which is a 1000 capacity, and every year we’ve been like, ‘mate, we’ve gotta play The Temple!’ It was ridiculous wasn’t it.”

F. “I kind of thought, we’re opening The Temple, it’s gonna be quiet, it’s the Thursday, no one’s even gonna be here, it’s gonna be dead but I just wanna play it, it’s got a really good sound-system and it’ll be really good for us. We were setting up, and Meg was getting a bit like, ‘oh my God, oh my God, oh my God’ I said, let’s just walk outside for a minute, calm ourselves down, then we’ll come back in and get ready for this. We walked outside and there were just hundreds of people queuing up to get in.”

M. “The whole way down the railway track as far as you could see, which did nothing to calm my nerves..”

F. “They were almost shaking the railings they wanted to get in so bad.”

M. “It was like 28 Days Later wasn’t it.”

F. “They opened the gates and they all just started running into The Temple, and I was like, GET IN, GET IN, PRESS PLAY!”

M. “So by the end of the first song it was full, and it’s enormous. It’s amazing because the DJ booth is really high up, so you’ve got this amazing birds eye view of the crowd. I think, because the weather had been so bad this year they hadn’t opened a lot of the after hours areas the night before, and also, a lot of people had been stuck in traffic. So I think on that Thursday, someone said half the people that were at Glastonbury didn’t get in until the Thursday, so for a lot of them it was their first proper night raving and we were the first people to open it, and it just went nuts.”

F. “And we went in really hard, we didn’t think we were going to, but then we just played this really hard set.”

M. “Which is exactly what we do every single time. The number of gigs where we’ve thought, we’ll just prep a slightly less bassy set, and then we get on stage and go, nah, let’s go in hard.” 

F. “Yeah, and I feel really sorry for the DJ that came on after us because he was playing disco or house and we were like, ‘sorry about that, we’re really sorry honestly.’ It was really bad DJ etiquette of slamming it in really hard.” 

TP. “It’s Glastonbury though, so we forgive you.”

M. “But we got it in a really geeky way the first year we played, and Franky always winds me up that I’m the ultimate ‘keener’, but hey, it pays off. We’ve done Glastonbury three years now, but the first year we were like, ‘right, we’ve gotta get this’, so I emailed every single stage that I could find contact details for, I must have sent out hundreds of emails. I said, hey guys, we’re Duchess DJ’s, this is what we play, here’s links to our Soundcloud.. no one emailed back apart from Steve, and he was like, ‘hey girls, I quite like what you’re playing, would you fancy playing on The Rumshack?’ And we were like, ‘whaaaaat?!’ And he said, ‘yeah, we’ll pay you.’ So we not only got free tickets to Glastonbury, but we got paid and we got to play. They put us on at 4-5 in the morning, and it was a slog to get there but after that I was like, ‘I’m not gonna sleep for days!’ Because of the adrenaline of doing it, and it doesn’t change. Every year you do this gig and then come off stage going, oh my God!”

F. “But The Rumshack is such a good stage because everyone there just really wants to dance.”

TP. “Yeah, that’s where I saw you wasn’t it, and you were amazing. Well It’s very apparent from that you have a lust for Bristol life and everything this amazing city has to offer, and that really shines through in the lifestyle blog, ‘It’s Just Nice’ that you run together with your friend Chloe. I love the friendly writing style and tell it like it is attitude that you employ throughout. What is it about Bristol that makes for such good reading and writing do you think?”

F. “Well we’re spoilt for choice. I lived in Kuala Lumpar for 2 years, I’ve just got back, and when you live in a different city, particularly one that’s so different, It was suddenly like, oh my, Bristol just has so much going on and so much happening. There are so many people doing creative things, and there’s such a nice environment here that you just don’t find in many other places. There are lots of great cities in the UK, of course, and all over the world, but Bristol just has this about it, and it’s just so nice here. I think that everyone that comes here is really good at adopting that Bristol chill, and really enjoy the city and help keep it independent, and lovely and local.”

M. “We call it the ‘Bristol loving’, and it does seem to be that everybody buys into the same kind of vibe. And like we were saying earlier, it thrives on its independence, it’s got an amazing food and drink scene, it’s got a wicked music scene. You are completely spoilt for choice whether you want to party, or go out to eat, or go out for drinks, or go shopping. You’ve literally got everything, and ‘It’s Just Nice’ cam about through the two of us, with our friend Chloe, going, this city’s great, why doesn’t anyone do a lifestyle blog?! We’ve been doing it for quite a long time now too, probably five or six years. We’re a little sporadic with our posting. Laughs. There’s lots of other things that have taken time away from it,  but it’s always nice to be able to say, ‘guys, guys, guys, you’ve gotta go here, it’s wicked!”

F. “And there was a time when there were a few blogs that would not be very positive about things, and a lot of these places that you’re giving bad reviews are small independents themselves and they don’t have huge marketing budgets, or huge amounts of money to spend, and actually, a few negative reviews could be quite damaging. What would be better, and way more constructive is talking to them and just giving feedback. If you go and write a bad review you’re just saying to the world, I don’t really rate this place, ad unfortunately people will read it and listen to it. We just thought, this isn’t what Bristol is about. Like we say, Bristol is a big ‘loving’ and that’s not to say that everything’s perfect, but there’s some really good stuff happening here, and it’s like your Mum always used to say, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

M. “And that’s where the name came from wasn’t it. We will only ever write about stuff that we like and that we think is just nice, and we are very lucky that we’ve got reams and reams of content to choose from in Bristol, and there’s new openings every single day, left, right and center.” Smiles.

TP. “Mmm, eating and drinking are definitely two of my favourite things to do. Now it’s quite clear from your amazing repertoire of skills that you’re both very talented girls. Where do you think the drive and passion comes from?”

M. “I think we’re very good at driving each other. We met when I first started at SIFT, and I think we first bonded over my love of Franky’s jump suit that she wore on the first day I started. I was like, ‘mate, where is that from?’ And we also discovered that we were into the same kind of music, and the Duchess DJ side of things came first. I ended up babysitting someones decks and Franks was like, ‘I’m gonna learn to DJ, I’m gonna book us a gig!’ So she booked us our first ever gig at The Fleece, neither of us had ever played out, and luckily it went really well and here we are today. But we are really good at driving each other, and we are really driven by the same things.”

F. “I also think we’re both complete work-a-holics. It’s a blessing, but then we never really stop.”

M. “Yeah, our poor boyfriends are like, ‘are you working again? Any time for us yet?” Laughs.

F. “I genuinely believe that if we sat doing nothing we would just shrivel up and die.”

M. “I’d go mad. I dread going on holiday because I can’t check the internet. Which is very sad I know.”

TP. “Well you’re doing incredibly well. So finally, what do you have in store for us over the next few months?”

F. “We’re on a really big Duchess Media offensive at the moment. We’ve grown quite rapidly in the last couple of months, and now we just want to take that growth and get even bigger. So that’s really our big driver, a few new clients, some exciting things happening, and I think with Duchess DJ’s, now that I’m back in Bristol, we just really want to get back in and start doing more gigs.”

M. “We’ve got a few lined up already. We DJ as part of a collective called Tun Up, with some really really good fellow Bristol DJ’s, and that seems to be picking up really well. It’s all Dancehall, Soca, Bass, and that’s massive at the moment so we’re getting a lot of good bookings through that. So if you’re into that kind of thing we’re gonna have loads of gigs coming up. We also went to an event last night and came away from it with another idea for events.”

F. “Yeah, we’ve got some event ideas, because we haven’t put on an event for a little while and we’re itching to do something. Meg had a killer idea last night, so I think our next project is a really big party.”

M. “I reckon we can pull it off for NYE.”

F. “And it will be a big one, so that’s very exciting.”

Here’s a feature on Bristol24/7 called Talking Passions. It’s a Bristol-based interview series that hopes to inspire your creative side by interviewing passionate individuals in Bristol’s arts and music scenes. The driving force behind the series is a belief that within each of us is a creative soul with untold capabilities. It’s not always easy to follow your dreams and try to make it work, and it should be celebrated! 

Started by local journalist Adam Chisman, and with links to various Collectives in the city including Liquifyah, The Coconut Collective, as well as Irish online magazine Ceol Caint, Talking Passions comes in two weekly parts, with brand new written interviews on talkingpassions.com and Bristol24/7 and audio interviews on BCFM’s The Bristol Music Show and Soundcloud.

If you’d like to get in touch with Meg and Frankie you can find them on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud and at ‘It’s Just Nice.’