Curiosity doesn’t need a passport, but it definitely helps.
Guided by Noble’s 2025 theme, Better Curiosity, members of Noble Studios’ U.S. team packed their bags for Bristol (where our U.K. office is located) through our International Team Travel Program. The exchange connects our teams across the Atlantic, turning collaboration into conversation and travel into a hands-on lesson in creative curiosity.
Programs like this are one reason Noble has been recognized by Ad Age as one of the Best Places to Work, and why many team members value the chance to grow beyond their daily roles. (It’s also a great reason to join the team if curiosity and creativity are your kind of work.)
Much of the trip centered around Be Better Bristol, the annual flagship event hosted by Noble’s Bristol office. The gathering brings together team members, partners and local creatives to share ideas, explore new perspectives, and celebrate the spirit of continuous improvement that defines Noble’s culture.
In addition to supporting the event, the visiting U.S. team led a series of Lunch & Learns for the Bristol office, sharing approaches to client strategy, performance marketing and creative collaboration while also gaining insight into how the U.K. team approaches similar challenges.
Throughout the week, curiosity revealed itself in conversations, experiments, and small moments of discovery. Each traveler experienced Better Curiosity in their own way. The reflections that follow capture those perspectives, from creative risk-taking to quiet connection and everything in between.
Gabbi Hall, Director of Brand Experience
2025 marked my second experience in our Bristol office, 3 years after I was here to support the launch of our Noble Deeds UK program. And what a difference 3 years makes! While Bristol is still the art-meets-grit-meets-history city it’s always been, our team has grown and changed in such exciting ways—nearly double the size with so many new specialties and skills. I loved simply getting curious about each of them and building new, meaningful connections with our team members. For example, Pauline, who specializes in analytics, hails from France, and we connected over a love of food. She describes the crab butter at Caper and Cure with the romantic enthusiasm you always want in a restaurant recommendation.
Of course, we connected over shared ways to be better at our work. We spent a lot of time discussing the importance of creativity and integrated strategy for our clients—how we mind map our retainers and projects to understand the interconnected pieces and opportunities, how we can use different brainstorming frameworks to spark big ideas for solving our clients’ biggest problems and how AI is only as good as the humans who train it. In fact, AI in the context of global travel was a hot topic for the Be Better Bristol event that we hosted alongside TIKI and Yours Sincerely.
The Be Better Bristol event offered up a great opportunity to connect with brilliant UK minds from PR, analytics, performance marketing, DMOs and travel-related businesses over a glass of wine. Connecting with the Visit West team and hearing all about the Jane Austen 250th Celebration that had taken place in Bath truly set my Pride-and-Prejudice-loving soul on fire. (If you’re remotely a Jane Austen or Bridgerton fan, don’t skip a trip to Bath. It’s like walking right into the stories.)
It left me inspired and excited about what’s next for all of us around the globe as we blend human creativity and AI.
Amanda Kaschmitter, Senior Project Manager
A Vivid Moment
Working alongside the Noble team in Bristol was eye-opening in the best way. Sitting together and sharing our approaches to the same challenges. Breanne Standingwater, a fellow US project Manager and Bristol visitor, and I presented on change management and quality control, but it quickly became a two-way learning exchange. Hearing how the UK team structures their work, especially after moving away from a dedicated project manager, sparked a lot of curiosity about what happens when everyone owns a bit of the process.
Challenging Assumptions and Unlocking Progress
One of the biggest assumptions I challenged was that project management always requires a single, central person to keep things running. In Bristol, accountability feels more distributed; every team member has to project manage themselves while the account manager leads the charge. The question that unlocked progress for me was simple: “What would it look like if everyone had more ownership over managing their own work?” That question reframed how I think about efficiency, ownership, and the space curiosity creates for people to take initiative.
Meaningful Connections
Talking with the Bristol team about their quality control process (QC) became a surprisingly rich conversation. They were curious about our U.S. approach, especially the idea of batching reviews and scheduling focused QC time. We were equally curious about how their leaner, closer-knit structure supports quality through communication. That exchange wasn’t just about optimizing a process; it was about seeing how curiosity, when shared, becomes collaboration.
What I’m Bringing Home
The practice I want to bring back to the U.S. is creating intentional time and space for reflection in the workday, both for myself and for my teams. The Bristol team’s approach to balance and their way of treating clients with steady calmness showed me that curiosity isn’t just a mindset; it’s a rhythm. I’ll know it’s working when I start noticing more thoughtful pauses in our meetings, more “why” questions before “how,” and more shared ownership of the work we do.
A Small Detail That Reframed Everything
There was a moment, walking through Bristol’s harborside after a long day, when it struck me how seamlessly the city blends history and modernity, old stone next to bright murals, tradition beside experimentation. That small detail mirrored the work we do every day: balancing what’s proven with what’s possible. Curiosity is what keeps that balance alive.
Sarah Perry, Senior Performance Marketing Manager
One of the highlights from the trip was presenting our email strategy to the UK team. I enjoyed talking with some of the team at our Be Better Bristol event about the presentation and comparing tactics; it was fun to explore similar challenges and share what metrics matter to different clients.
What surprised me most was seeing the UK team’s balance of focus and ease in their day-to-day. Like Amanda mentioned, there’s a rhythm to how they seem to work collaboratively, yet a calm that reminded me that curiosity thrives when there’s room to breathe and collaborate. It has made me rethink some of my own assumptions about my day-to-day pace and productivity, and how building in space for calm moments and habits like breakfast and coffee away from my desk, walks and lunch with friends leads to sharper ideas and better productivity and focus.
Coming home, I want to carry the lifestyle approach with me: making time for connection with coworkers, asking more “what if” questions in our meetings, and carving out moments of pause instead of rushing to the next task. If I can feel that same sense of focus, ease and balance during my own workday, I’ll know it’s working.
And as a small spark from the city itself, being in a place like Bristol (and London) surrounded by people heading into work, stopping at cafés, chatting while walking, there’s an energy to urban life that reminds you inspiration often hides in ordinary moments. When you slow just enough to notice, ideas emerge.
Breanne Standingwater, Associate Director, Project Management
Hanging out with the UK team was amazing. They are endlessly kind and generous. One moment I won’t forget was watching Adventurous William and Andy try a “picked egg in a bag of crisps” at the pub. It looked weird, tasted weirder, and reminded me that curiosity isn’t just about work, it’s about saying yes to the ridiculous.
Our teams are different in size and focus. Back home, we are growing fast and standardizing processes. In Bristol, the team is smaller and they don’t have dedicated project managers, which means everything has to be lean, flexible, and efficient. Seeing their workflow made me realize our differences are actually complementary. Our structured approach could help them maintain consistency, and their streamlined processes inspired ideas to simplify ours. It reinforced the session takeaways: quality is everyone’s job, structured change helps adoption, and soft skills keep work aligned.
During one session, someone asked if QC should only focus on the big tasks. I said no, even tiny misses erode trust, and trust is hard to get back. Curiosity matters in the small stuff, too.
The best part of the trip has been the human moments. Grabbing pints, wandering Finzels Market, catching a football match with a canned G&T, and surviving on three hours of sleep per night made every adventure feel huge.
Back in the US, I want to experiment boldly, embrace the unexpected, and notice the little things that matter. A sign it’s working? When our team laughs, learns, and maybe even tries a picked egg in a bag of crisps.
William Crozer, Associate Director of Internal Marketing
Curiosity, Served Pickled with a Bag of Crisps
Right before the Be Better Bristol event, Andy, Bre and I stopped by a proper pub near the office for a quick pint. On the menu was something called pickled egg and crisps. I had to ask if it was exactly what it sounded like. The barman said yes, as if this was the most normal thing.
So we ordered it. He asked which egg we wanted, herb or spicy, and a container of bags of crisps with all sorts of flavors. I figured for this first time, let’s play it safe: herbed pickled egg and plain crisps.
You know what? It worked! The vinegar from the egg played off the salt from the crisps, kind of like a pub version of eggs and potatoes. It wasn’t fancy, but it was good.
That little experiment reminded me that curiosity doesn’t always mean asking big questions. Sometimes it’s just trying something odd and finding joy in the unexpected real moments.
So Many Meaningful Connections
Going into this trip, I was solidly in a season of change. Traveling alone can sometimes feel heavy or isolating, but I never felt that once. I felt like every moment pulled me to connection.
In London, a night out with Gabbi and Jared reminded me what genuine joy, conversation, friendship and too much wine feel like. In Bristol, seeing the team in person, instead of Zoom, was grounding in the best way. Whether it was chatting with Noble’s CEO Jarrod about life and work, sharing leftover wine-tasting cards with Costas and Jegor, touring Stonehenge and the Cotswolds with Sarah and Brad, or just laughing in a pizza shop after a long day, it all added up to something I didn’t know I needed.
What surprised me most was how connection showed up everywhere, not just with the team. The nicest lady in the Harrods wine department gave me a spontaneous 30-minute tour of their finest selections. A 90s-era record shop owner in Manchester talked with me for a while about music, Vegas, teen daughters and life. Even Man City fans singing on the train to the match felt like a reminder that belonging should happen anywhere and everywhere.
Coming home, that’s what I want to keep. Staying curious and open about people to find those connecting moments.
A Spark from the City
It was just before 7 am on a Saturday morning when I left Bristol. The city was quiet, the streets were barely still waking up. I was running on almost no sleep after being out late at the club the night before. Groggy and content, dragging my bag through the arches of the station.
For a moment, I stopped. It was a smell-the-roses moment. The light was soft and the bricks were almost glowing. The space was empty except for a few early travelers, and it was so quiet. Honestly, it felt like walking through a film set that was part cathedral and part Diagon Alley. I snapped a photo so I wouldn’t forget it in my haze, and now looking back, it’s one of my favorites from the whole trip.
Better Curiosity, Everywhere
As the reflections show, Better Curiosity isn’t just a theme for the year; it’s a mindset that travels. Whether through collaboration, conversation, or quiet observation, curiosity connects teams, sparks new ideas, and keeps Noble’s culture growing on both sides of the Atlantic.
