By Catherine Jordan Jones, director, Barley Communications
We’re really proud to have been awarded a Stationers’ Company Warrant for our social purpose communications for the second-year running.
It’s always lovely to be recognised, but this one feels particularly meaningful. Not just because it’s a respected award, but because it comes from an organisation with a long-standing connection to the industries Barley is part of today.
The Stationers’ Company is the City of London livery company for the communications and content industries. Its roots go back more than 600 years, and over that time it has continued to evolve alongside the sectors it represents, from print and publishing to media and digital communications. Today, it brings together senior people from across those industries to support their development, success and future direction.
The Stationers’ Warrant is an independent mark of recognition for excellence across the communications and content industries. For Barley, it recognises not just the quality of our work, but social purpose communications as a discipline in its own right — one that deserves to be taken seriously, invested in properly and held to a high standard.
At Barley, we’ve always believed that communications can and should make a positive difference. Since we started in 2016, that belief has shaped the work we do, the clients we choose to work with and the standards we hold ourselves to. We’ve built the agency around the idea that purpose and performance go hand in hand, and that great communications can help move important issues forward.
Over the years, we’ve worked hard to build an approach that helps clients connect strategy and delivery in a much more meaningful way. So often, communications can feel fragmented — good ideas not quite linked closely enough to organisational goals, or strong strategies that lose momentum when it comes to implementation. Our job is to bridge that gap: to make sure insight, planning, creativity and delivery are all working together to create real impact.
But for us, the work has never just been about output. It’s also about how we run the agency behind it.
We’ve made a conscious effort to build a business that reflects the same values we bring to our clients. That includes everything from flexible working and a strong focus on inclusion, to being thoughtful about the briefs we take on and making space to support organisations doing important work through our Comms Clinic. We want Barley to be a place where brilliant people can do meaningful work in a way that feels sustainable, ambitious and genuinely rewarding.
In the past few years, we’ve reached some important milestones that reflect that wider commitment. Becoming employee-owned was a big moment for us, helping protect the culture and independence we’ve worked hard to build. Becoming a certified B Corp was another, giving external validation to the way we think about responsibility, accountability and impact. Alongside that, we’ve continued to look closely at how we operate as a business, including our environmental impact and the long-term role we want Barley to play.
Of course, recognition is never the end goal. But it is encouraging when the approach resonates.
Being awarded a second Stationers’ Company Warrant feels like a reminder that there is real value in doing things this way: being clear on your purpose, being ambitious about quality and refusing to separate commercial success from positive impact.
For me, that’s what this Warrant represents. It’s a reflection of the kind of agency we’ve worked hard to build: one that does excellent work, supports good people and uses communications to contribute something genuinely worthwhile. Having that recognised by The Stationers’ Company, with its long-standing connection to our industry, makes this award especially meaningful.