Our Story

OCCO exists because burnout is not a personality trait. And ambition shouldn't require one.

We met on a Sunday, on Bumble. Then Tuesday. Then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Seven years on, we run a company together — Ollie and Clare, two designers who separately spent years learning the hard way what it costs to have a fast-moving mind and never give it the right structure.

Before OCCO

Neither of us knew the other existed yet. Both of us were working in London at the top of our fields.

Ollie was designing theatre sets. Not small productions — West End and touring shows: Bat Out of Hell: The Musical, Dreamgirls: The Musical, The Nutcracker Ballet. The kind of pressure where the deadline doesn't move because 1,500 people have a ticket and the curtain goes up regardless.

Clare was designing retail experiences and brand environments for names like Lacoste, Cadbury, Tanqueray, Sipsmith — immersive spaces built under real budgets and real constraints, the kind of brief where the client changes everything at 5pm on a Friday and the thing still has to open on time.

Neither of us saw it coming. And neither of us clocked it in the other — we were too deep in our own version of it to see it clearly in anyone else.

Clare's version showed up as a diagnosis of anxiety and depression. Ollie's showed up as burnout, and its consequences, in ways he didn't have the language for yet. Both of us kept going for longer than we should have — because that's what ambitious people do when nobody's given them a better option. The creative industries are built around the idea that if you're good enough, the pressure is just part of the job. We'd both internalised that story. We both paid for it.

What helped wasn't a morning routine, and it wasn't a mindfulness app. It was therapy. Coaching. CBT. A serious look at what cognitive science actually says about how high-performing brains function under load — and what causes them to collapse.

What we found was structure. The right question at the right moment. A way of getting the mental load out of our heads and onto paper — into something that could hold it — so our brains could do what they're actually good at, instead of cycling the same loop at 2am. Physical. Simple. Grounded in science. Ten minutes. Three priorities. A place for the overflow that never makes it onto a to-do list.

We started printing our own worksheets — A4 sheets kept in a stack on the side, grabbed when we needed them. That's where the first version of OCCO actually lived: not in a business plan, but in a pile of paper we kept because it genuinely helped and we didn't want to lose it.

We looked for tools built around this properly. We didn't find them. What existed was either corporate productivity theatre — time-blocking systems that assumed total control of your calendar — or pastel journals with blank pages and vague prompts that assumed you woke up calm with 45 minutes spare. Nothing built for people with fast-moving minds doing real, high-output work.

The printed sheets were the weak link, too. Friends who saw them on the side started asking for copies. We gave them out. They came back saying the same tools that had helped us were helping them — which told us two things: the method wasn't just useful to two burnt-out creatives, and the format, not the technique, was what needed fixing. Loose A4 curls, goes missing, isn't something you want to reach for on the day you least want to. If the tool itself feels like admin, you stop using it exactly when you need it most.

This is where the theatre and experiential design backgrounds stopped being incidental and became the actual design brief. In theatre, you don't get to say "it mostly works" — an audience either has the experience or it breaks. In experiential design, the physical object and the space carry the meaning; if the material feels cheap, the whole thing reads as cheap, no matter how good the idea underneath it is.

We brought that standard to something that had, until then, been living as scrap paper. If a tool is going to hold someone's worst Tuesday, it has to be well made enough that picking it up doesn't feel like one more chore. That's not decoration. It's load-bearing.

OCCO

OCCO stands for Ollie, Clare, Clare, Ollie — which is both the founders and an accidental reminder that what we built came from two people who arrived at the same answer from different directions.

The four tools — the Morning Mindset Journal, Weekly Planner Pad, Priority Pad, and Could Do Pad — are built around what cognitive science shows about how ambitious minds work when they're operating well, and what goes wrong when they're not. Each one is undated, physical, and designed to be used in under twenty minutes a day. Built to hold up on a difficult Tuesday in November, not just when everything's going well.

We don't do wellness clichés. We do tools that work.

We use OCCO's own products less than we used to — which is, honestly, the outcome we were hoping for. Ollie still starts most mornings with ten minutes and the Morning Mindset Journal before opening a laptop — not because it's a ritual, but because it's the fastest way to know what the day actually requires before the noise decides for him. Clare's version, on a loud week, is the Priority Pad: three things, written down, everything else parked. Neither of us pretends we're cured. Burnout isn't a phase you graduate from permanently — it comes back, in smaller doses, when work gets loud again. Having something physical, specifically built to get it out of your head and make it feel manageable, is still what works.

The team

Clare runs creative and product. Ollie runs commercial and strategy. Squiggle the Spaniel runs morale — and is, frankly, the most consistent member of the team.