Dama Dama
Long-term creative direction across the full lifecycle of my co-founded independent record label
Co-founded and led creative direction for Dama Dama across an eight-year arc - from independent label launch in 2017, through a multi-year Ninja Tune subsidiary partnership, into a lifestyle brand with merchandise and events, and now into a curated cultural archive as the label completes its wind-down.
Brief
An independent label co-founded to support friends' musical projects
Dama Dama Records was co-founded in 2017 with Maribou State as an independent UK label, originally built to support a community of friends' musical projects and get their releases out into the world. The brief, in the beginning, was open: build a label that felt culturally specific, didn't behave like a major-label imprint, and gave artists creative ownership over how their music was released.
Insight
Independent labels weren't competing as distributors anymore. They were becoming cultural platforms.
Across the label's eight-year run, the music industry transformed structurally - streaming grew from 67% to 84% of US recorded music revenue between 2017 and 2025 (RIAA Year-End Report), the traditional sign-release-distribute model came under sustained pressure, and competing on catalogue alone stopped being viable for independent labels. The strategic move that shaped Dama Dama's longevity was to position the label as a cultural platform rather than a distributor, recognising that the audience valued community, taste, and curation over catalogue access. The insight that informed every brand decision: Dama Dama's value wasn't the music itself, it was the worldview around the music - the aesthetic, the community, the sense of being part of something culturally specific. That repositioning enabled the label to evolve well beyond traditional record label territory, into the multi-year Ninja Tune subsidiary partnership, a lifestyle and merchandise brand, events, and editorial content.
Build
Long-term creative direction across every phase of the label's lifecycle
The work spanned the full eight-year arc as co-founder and creative lead, across four connected phases: an original brand identity grounded in cultural specificity - earthy, natural, considered, slightly mystical, distinctly not corporate-music-industry - held consistent across record sleeves, merchandise, event identity, and digital, with editorial content treated with the same weight as releases to build audience loyalty between releases rather than only at release moments; through the Ninja Tune subsidiary partnership, brand systems that held under enterprise-tier expectations while keeping the label's independent identity intact; a Shopify-built lifestyle and ecommerce store during the active growth phase, carrying the label's music, vinyl, and merchandise alongside curated lifestyle releases; and now, in the wind-down, a minimalist single-page archive site replacing the active store, redirecting visitors to the artists' ongoing musical work on Spotify and social, closing the label's lifecycle as a curated cultural memorial rather than letting it disappear into broken links.
Outcome
A brand that compounded across eight years and three distinct business phases
Dama Dama evolved from independent label, to lifestyle brand with cultural reach beyond the music itself, sustained through a multi-year Ninja Tune subsidiary partnership, and now closes gracefully as a curated archive. Running the store through that growth taught me the commercial side of e-commerce from the operator's seat - stock, margin, checkout, conversion - not just the design of it. The strongest brand work is rarely the launch moment alone - it's the strategic consistency that holds the brand together across every phase that follows, including the phase where the brand has to know how to step back.
