Nearly 20 years ago, Sam Bompas quit his job in property PR to make jelly. Since then, as co-founder of Bompas & Parr, Sam has cooked on molten lava, built a breathable cloud of gin and tonic, and founded the British Museum of Food.
His studio works with governments, global brands like Coca-Cola, Johnnie Walker, and Mercedes, and major cultural institutions including the V&A, the Design Museum, and The Met. It has reached over 10 million people through its installations worldwide. His current project, an underground Shakespeare museum built inside a real Elizabethan theatre, might be his most ambitious yet.
In a recent conversation with Future London Academy, he shared his remarkable hard-won wisdom about creativity, leadership, and what it really takes to build something lasting.
Sam and his co-founder Harry started Bompas & Parr without a business plan. As Sam now reflects, if they'd written one, they would have immediately seen how impractical the whole idea was and never started at all. The plan would have been the obstacle.
The early, unguarded stage of a creative idea has its own energy that is genuinely hard to manufacture once you've become experienced and risk-aware.
The good news is that naivety can be consciously rekindled. Setting yourself challenges in areas where you're not yet an expert, or committing to something before you've fully worked out how to deliver it, can bring back that productive edge.
One of Sam's most favourite creative habits is getting inspiration directly from history. Because the things that delighted people 400 years ago are not fundamentally different from the things that delight us now.
He reconstructed a 17th-century naval punch bowl as a modern installation where guests rowed across a cognac-filled room in London. While the inspiration was 300 years old, the experience was completely original.
History forces you to look at things differently. But materials, regulations, and technologies have all changed, which means any reconstruction inevitably becomes something new.
Sam's litmus test for a strong idea is deceptively simple. A good idea should be easy to explain in a sentence and easy to picture immediately. Take Lava Banquet as an example: they took basalt rock, melted it into actual lava, and cooked with it. You understand it instantly, can picture it, and probably want to go.
If an idea requires a long explanation before someone gets excited, it usually means the concept isn’t fully formed. The core idea needs to be clear enough that a stranger could grasp it in seconds. This is a useful discipline for any pitch, brief, or creative review.
It's also a good test to apply before a client meeting. If you can't describe what you're proposing in one clear sentence, you may not yet know what you're proposing.
When hiring, Sam pays close attention to what candidates are genuinely excited about. The subject doesn't matter — it could be bell ringing, an obscure form of dance, or the history of duelling. What matters is whether the person has the capacity for a deep interest in anything at all. People who can’t answer the question "What are you excited about?" tend to struggle in creative environments, regardless of their technical skills.
The same principle applies to pitching. Sam is unequivocal: only present ideas you genuinely want to make. If you're truly excited about something, that excitement passes on and removes the need to "sell." Clients can tell if you’re not excited, and you'll be stuck making something you didn't want to make in the first place.
The relentless scroll of social media is one of the things Sam finds most creatively draining. Everyone else's output creates a paralysing standard before you've even started. The studio's answer is to make things with their hands, regularly and deliberately.
Bompas & Parr has a physical workshop in the studio where everyone can play around with different tools and make things by hand. Physical making produces endorphins and unlocks extra creative ideas.
On top of that, it causes what psychologists call the IKEA effect: you instinctively value something more once you've made it yourself.
Bompas & Parr once built a chocolate waterfall so spectacular that you could smell it from a street away. It was genuinely remarkable. But when visitors arrived, they experienced it in about 15 minutes and left underwhelmed. Not because the waterfall wasn't extraordinary, but because there was nothing else around it. The hero idea and the experience of it had been treated as the same problem. They're not.
This is one of the most transferable lessons in the whole conversation, and it applies well beyond experiential design. Every creative output has a headline idea and then an experience of that idea. The quality of the first does not guarantee the quality of the second. The journey a person takes through your work, the moments before and after the centrepiece, the questions they're left with all need designing too.
Sam doesn’t believe in the idea that creative geniuses are unpredictable, hard to manage, and allergic to constraint. In his view, these are people who aren't crediting their collaborators. Real creativity is almost always collective, and the creatives who build long, meaningful careers are invariably good to work with, not just good at ideas.
Sam references Christopher Nolan to make this point: Nolan became successful not just because he had great ideas, but because he consistently delivers his films on time and slightly under budget. In an industry where directors routinely go over on both, that track record is what earns him the trust to work with autonomy.
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