Profile: Nik Ellwood and Steve Lambert

Nik added: “Yes, and when John Wick tells you what to call your company, you just do it!

“But then we got back to the UK and the whole world stopped. Thankfully, we’d signed up ARCH Motorcycles for the first year so we could do lots of work with them over Zoom. All of Keanu’s filming had stopped so we could just get on with the brand/strategy work.

“It all came together and then we picked up other businesses along the way.”

The fact that there is a great story behind the company name tells you a lot about the business itself. Nik and Steve are experts at telling a tale and it’s something they’ve been doing for businesses throughout their careers.

Steve started at Peugeot at Aldermoor House in Coventry and enjoyed various roles that eventually took him to Paris. When he reached the halfway stage of his career, he was thinking about a change and got a call about a role with Triumph Motorcycles to head up its brand and marketing.

Nik had a passion for motorcycles from the age of ten but actually got a degree in animal science, nutrition and physiology. The BSE crisis put paid to him pursuing a career associated with his formal education and he took up a role in PR for a bike clothing business.

He moved to an agency but realised spreadsheets weren’t for him. That’s when he approached Triumph about a possible role – and just wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“When I was recruiting I was getting fed up of people who kept saying the same thing,” said Steve. “They loved the brand, their dad had a Triumph, but I needed someone who was really good at marketing.

“The recruitment consultant came to me one day and said that he’d got a guy who loved motorcycles and loved the brand and my first instinct was ‘no’!

“He said he’d got a lot of agency experience and I was just thinking that I’d heard it all a million times.

“But then this guy persuaded the recruitment consultant to meet me at the Birmingham Bike Show and we got on like a house on fire. It was Nik and he came on board.”

Nik said: “Steve and I have worked together for around 15 years in different roles. It was at Triumph where we first joined up although Steve initially refused to give me an interview for the job.

“I had to persuade him how wrong he was! But we had a really good time at Triumph over the course of around four years.”

It turned out they are yin and yang – and the combination worked perfectly. Steve’s head for strategy was the perfect foil for Nik’s creative ideas.

The pair delivered a successful rebranding exercise for Triumph that saw them do everything from attempting land speed records through to David Beckham riding through the jungle on a motorcycle ahead of the 2014 World Cup.

They parted ways when Steve left for McLaren and Nik toyed with the idea of setting up a motorcycle magazine but ended up working on a contract basis with Harley Davidson.

“Halfway through that, the whole thing got ruined because they got a new international marketing director – none other than Steve Lambert!” said Nik. “So, we were back working together!

“We were then doing wild things for Harley and that’s always been how it works.

“Steve’s background has always been OEM manufacturer side. I’ve done a mix of agency and OEM side. I’m quite creative and idea-driven – and quite chaotic – whereas Steve is the best strategic planning thinker that I’ve worked with.”

Steve said: “Everything about us is different. I drink coffee, he drinks tea. I have brown sauce, he has red. We’re opposites. I’m order. He’s chaos. But we have never, ever fallen out.

“I’m mostly right! But seriously, I know if I’ve got a massive problem I can solve it 80 per cent on my own, but together we can get to 120 per cent and we can do it in an hour. We’ve just got a way of working together that begins with a nugget of an idea that grows into something really big.

“It was only a few weeks ago when Nik was driving home which is about 40 minutes away and I phoned him about a challenge that was really getting at me. By the time he got home, it was all mapped out! We’ve just got a knack of working together and producing results bigger than the sum of our parts.”

This perfect combination is why We Are Nameless has now grown to a team of 17 as of January 2025 and is based in the beautiful surroundings of Braunston, near Daventry. The company has worked predominantly in the automotive sector and has pulled off some major coups –including supporting BYD, one of the world’s largest electric vehicle brands.

Steve said: “We did loads of strategy for them for their European launch. Now, we look after their UK marketing and they're a big client for us.

“We’ve accelerated really quickly with automotive –between motorcycle brands and car brands we grew rapidly.”

Over the past year, the company has shifted into more sectors.

“We built up the skillsets internally,” said Nik. “We’ve got content creators, we’ve got social media expertise and actually the theory and the activation of any strategy or campaign is all the same.

“You are motivating consumers to make a decision. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a car or a washing machine. You need to understand the motivations, understand the needs and then find the messages that will compel them to engage with the brand or product that you are serving.

“It’s brilliant working in automotive. We love it. We’re car and bike fans and we’ve got a unit full of different toys but there was so much more we could do and when you look at what’s out there, we knew there were great businesses in this region we could work with.”

And while their expertise in brand and strategy is crucial to their success, they believe it’s their agility and honesty that are helping to set them apart.

Nik said: “Our approach is to be totally transparent. When we started the company we said it would incorporate high effectiveness and expertise.

“If someone comes to us with a brief and we don’t think it’s for us or a good spend of their money, we won’t do it. If that person or project walks away, we know we haven’t wasted their money. That feels like a good place to be.”

Steve added: “We’re also used to doing things at the very last minute and at pace.

“In 2023, on the day before Christmas Eve, we got a call from China saying that BYD had just sponsored the Euros (football) and they needed a TV advert creating by Boxing Day!

“We were about to leave the office for Christmas and they wanted to send us the script on the 25th! We had to say we couldn’t quite do that and pushed the deadline back to the 28th. So, throughout that Christmas we were working and got a local football team, professional players and studios all sorted, making everything happen really quickly. And we delivered the goods!

“We say yes and then figure out a way of doing it. I like working in a planned way but we’ve been successful in leaning into all of our experience, a massive black book of contacts of people who can help and just having an attitude of making things work.

“And, somehow, our personalities just work perfectly together and even if we start at different points, we’re always on the same path.”