About Us
We’re changing the way people connect
Putting on amazing shows is what it's all about. The ability to transport audiences to points in history or far away to fairytale lands. To tell a captivating story that inspires is inspiration itself. It compels us to imagine how we can make shows better by overcoming the many constraints that put limits on a production.
Pursued By Bear is a marketplace for theatre creatives to hire their under-utilised stock to other industry partners. We facilitate costume and equipment hires for producers by providing an easy to search catalogue of costumes from a wide variety of providers unlike the current solution of making on-site visits to providers who have limited availability. By providing access for producers to big ticket items, they can unlock creativity and support the development of shows. All while keeping down storage costs by making hiring an appealing solution unlike today's model.
Our story
As theatre producers, every time we put on a new show, we built a new set, made new costumes and commissioned new wigs. Then, when the show was over, we took all that fantastic new stuff we'd made and put it in storage until the next time we put the show on. After only a few seasons we had sets for everything from Sleeping Beauty to Rumpelstiltskin, as well as a prodigious collection of 2,000 costumes all neatly stored in a 5,000sq ft warehouse. Our modest operation produces 4 shows each Christmas. For the rest of the year, all that fantastic stuff we'd made and collected was doing nothing, and costing us rent for the privilege. What a waste!
We rented a few things out to other practitioners we knew - people who knew what we had, and knew our phone number - but we dreamed of having our own rental website to try and realise the value of our assets...
Over the past 12 months we have been working with IT developers and creative practitioners to develop pursuedbybear.co.uk, an online portal that is revolutionising the way the creative industries operates: cutting waste, developing revenue streams and connecting practitioners.
In 2023 we were awarded the UK Government's Innovation and Research Prize for the Creative Arts which has been a springboard to making this a reality. And now we're super excited to be rolling out pursuedbybear.co.uk to everyone working in the creative sector.
Welcome to the new way of working.
