Before there was an agency, there were berries. Chris Klopper picked mulberries by hand and sold them door to door in his youth. When he founded a communications business in 1995, he gave it the fruit’s name. It was a modest piece of autobiography to carry into a profession that spends a great deal of time deciding what things ought to be called. The name already had a customer, a product and a reason to knock.
That beginning makes a useful entrance to Klopper’s working life. He spent nearly 23 years leading Mulberry Marketing Communications, an agency with its headquarters in London and work beyond Britain. Its subjects included the equipment, software and services that keep other businesses moving. These are markets in which a familiar face and a useful explanation can matter considerably more than public recognition.
A name with something to sell
The berry story survived its founder. In 2019, Mulberry refreshed its identity with a logo showing a cross-section of the fruit. Its colours reflected the berry’s progression from white through plum to black. A childhood selling venture had become a small visual record of the company’s origins. You could encounter the logo without knowing the story; knowing it made the mark rather more interesting.
The new positioning placed personal relationships at the centre of business marketing. That emphasis fits the origin particularly well. Door-to-door selling puts the transaction at a recognisable scale: one person offers something and another person decides. An agency can add offices, formats and geographical reach, but it still has to make an offer intelligible to somebody. A logo cannot do that work. It can remind people where to begin.
Mulberry’s July 2020 anniversary marked a quarter-century since its founding on 9 July 1995. By that milestone, the agency described offices in London, Chicago and Melbourne. Klopper had died in 2018. The anniversary therefore belonged partly to the people carrying the business forward, with his choice of name still over the door. A business can travel a considerable distance while keeping a small piece of its first story in its luggage.
The appeal of the unglamorous brief
There is plenty to explain in a specialist market. A hotel’s software, a distributor’s equipment or a manufacturer’s new product arrives with details that matter enormously to a particular buyer. The casual reader may never recognise the brand. The person responsible for a purchase may need to understand it very well indeed. Klopper’s professional territory gave him repeated opportunities to work in that gap.
A 2013 announcement about IDeaS and Availpro gives the flavour of the work. It listed Klopper at Mulberry as a media contact and described an integration between revenue-management software and a channel manager. The practical point was automated distribution of hotel rates to booking channels, reducing manual entry. This is precise commercial material. The communications task is to make the consequence clear without losing the mechanism that makes it credible.
Klopper also watched the cleaning industry become more attentive to marketing. In 2013, he described a shift away from companies led largely by engineering or production, where communication could sit awkwardly at the edge of someone else’s job. He saw marketers gaining a place in senior decision-making and campaigns becoming more carefully targeted. His observation concerned authority inside the business as much as the appearance of its advertising.
That distinction matters. When marketing participates in decisions about products and pricing, the communicator has something more substantial to work with than a request to make the brochure brighter. A campaign can connect what a company makes with the reasons a customer might care. Klopper’s account treated this as a change in the industry’s habits, with a wider choice of channels creating further possibilities.
He also credited a regional trade publication with encouraging manufacturers to look beyond their national markets. That is an appropriately practical view of a professional press: it helps people see where their industry is going. For an agency working across borders, that wider field of attention creates both an audience and a responsibility to understand it.
A little restraint goes a long way
By 2017, Klopper reported annual turnover just below £3 million and work reaching audiences in more than 60 countries that year. He called his approach cautiously yet continuously ambitious
. Chicago had opened in 2003; international growth followed client opportunities. He also credited hiring bookkeeping and accounting help early, saying the agency had remained profitable without needing an overdraft.
There is something pleasantly untheatrical about putting the bookkeeper in a founder’s account of growth. Expansion has an obvious public face: the office opening, the announcement, the extra dot on a map. Keeping track of obligations happens away from that photograph. Yet the financial arrangements determine how much freedom the company actually has when an opportunity arrives.
His choice of words leaves room for restraint to be part of ambition. A founder can want more work, more markets and more scope for colleagues while still asking whether a particular commitment makes sense. The question becomes sharper when the business is personal. Klopper described Mulberry as his third child
. Affection and responsibility occupied the same sentence.
“cautiously yet continuously ambitious”
Chris Klopper, 2017
Four hundred balloons, one useful explanation
One campaign Klopper singled out in 2012 involved Digi International and Connecting Light, an installation along Hadrian’s Wall. About 400 illuminated balloons passed messages through changing colour. The effect gave a visible form to connected technology. Klopper valued its ability to show what the client’s systems could do, rather than leaving the explanation entirely to words.
The artwork was created by the digital collective YesYesNo with artist and programmer Zachary Lieberman. It formed part of the London 2012 Festival and ran on 31 August and 1 September. Viewers could send messages remotely; people along the wall could encounter clusters of the communicating balloons. The old frontier became the setting for a contemporary exchange.
The distinction between making the artwork and communicating the technology matters. The artists supplied the work’s idea and experience. Klopper discussed its usefulness in explaining a client’s capabilities. Those contributions meet without becoming interchangeable. A good demonstration gives the viewer something to understand on their own terms, while leaving the underlying invention visible.
There is a useful editorial lesson here. An abstract explanation asks a reader to imagine the result. A demonstration gives that imagination a starting point. The balloons did not require a passing spectator to arrive with an interest in device communications. Their colour and movement created a reason to look. The technical explanation could follow an experience people already wanted to talk about.
A conversation can still wander
Klopper’s interest in communication included a candid view of his own behaviour online. In a 2012 discussion of Twitter, he recommended active interaction and acknowledged that he could get distracted by posting things of little importance. He understood the platform’s usefulness and the temptation to remain on it rather longer than intended.
The admission gives his advice some welcome scale. Professional communication happens through ordinary human habits: curiosity, enthusiasm, boredom, the pleasure of an exchange. An adviser who notices his own tendency to wander has at least encountered the problem from the inside. The advice becomes easier to hear when the speaker is standing on the same pavement as everyone else.
In a separate 2012 interview, he described a social-media approach built around monitor, participate and publish
. He was an Everton supporter whose imagined dinner guests included David Moyes, Martin Sorrell and the Queen. It was a table with football, agency growth and the durability of public reputation all represented. Seating arrangements might have taken a little thought.
The network behind the work
When colleagues in the trade remembered Klopper in June 2018, their recollections reached beyond Mulberry. They recalled his earlier work at Spurgeon Walker Klopper and a Honeywell Christmas press party at Madame Tussauds. A room full of wax celebrities is a fairly good place to give a journalist something to remember. This particular event had plainly succeeded in doing so.
They also remembered his lectures at Dimensions International Business School in Singapore and appearances at industry events, including the UK Cleaning Show. These details place him within a working community of editors, clients and other professionals. The agency’s geographical reach was one part of that picture. The repeated encounters that made people remember him were another.
In October 2018, the ISSA Hygieia Network gave Klopper a posthumous Special Honors Award. The recognition concerned his role in helping develop the network and his support for women in the industry and beyond. The organisation’s purpose included the advancement and retention of women in cleaning. That contribution belongs alongside the agency’s commercial history when considering his career.
Matt Serra’s appointment as CEO was announced in September 2018. Serra spoke of carrying forward the founder’s principles; board member Keith Baker expressed confidence in his ability to build on Klopper’s legacy. The handover put continuity into other people’s hands. By the 25th anniversary, the work of sustaining it had become part of Mulberry’s story too.
An agency survives through fresh decisions, new assignments and colleagues who make the business their own. Its founder leaves habits as well as a name. Klopper left a fruit with a selling story attached, an international business and relationships that extended beyond its accounts. The berry on the door offers a suitably human place to start remembering him.