INK Focus - Bisoye Babalola's Holiday Club

Founded by Bisoye Babalola, Holiday Club serves as a talent incubator and creative studio aimed at nurturing and empowering the next generation of creative talent.

Holiday Club Summer School, is a three-week program, free and open to all 18-25 year olds. It offers classes and workshops lead by industry leaders where the participants take part in creating the annual edition of the Holiday Club Magazine.

We sat down with Bisoye Babalola to learn more about the origins of Holiday Club and its future ambitions.

Can you tell us in broad strokes how you would define the Holiday Club’s mission?

Holiday Club's mission is ever-evolving, but at its core, it's about helping people reach their full potential and creating a fairer, more equal space for them to access the creative industry. No matter their background or circumstances, the sky's the limit! Our goal is to provide insight, opportunities and jobs in the creative sector. To ultimately, serve as a bridge and support system between young creatives and industry leaders, showing them the incredible talent that is often overlooked due to lack of opportunity.

You are now on your third edition of the Holiday Club magazine. How has the initiative evolved since you first started?

I’ve been running Holiday Club for close to five years now and it has evolved so much! We started out simply organising workshops, introducing young people to what the creative sector looks like. Now we offer an annual summer school, we’re organising events and are working in recruitment and mentoring,  building internship programs and partnering with companies including North Six, All 8, ITV and INK. And of course the magazine. As everything else, it has evolved a lot since its first edition, which was initially just a test and a means for us to bring a cohesive project together for the summer school participants. Now, slowly but surely, we're evolving into being a proper media space, collaborating with some of fashion and designs biggest names to really carve out a great magazine. It’s all created by our alumni and summer school participants but serves as a platform for a much wider community. We know only a few can attend and it’s really important to us to give a space and reach to more and more young people to inspire them and provide them some helpful information like job opportunities etc. The magazine is available for free in local shops, but is also available for sale for those who can and want to support the initiative!

How do you ensure that the Holiday Club remains relevant in such a rapidly evolving and competitive industry?

That's a great question, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot and that we have to anticipate. Holiday Club now has multiple facets: in addition to the core educational and mentoring work, we’ve launched Holiday Club Studios, our own production and marketing agency. This allows us to bring creative ideas around contemporary culture to life and gives us a competitive edge in the market. It also opens up opportunities to hire young people, which is exciting.

On the educational side, Holiday Club is driven by experienced creatives who run our workshops, our alumni also play a huge role in shaping the programming. I regularly seek their input to ensure we stay relevant to what's happening in culture today. We're also building out a strong media arm, including our magazine, which is something I believe hasn’t been done in our space.

There are a lot of layers to Holiday Club, and I hope that in 10 years, people will recognize the impact we’ve had in supporting talent across the creative industry, especially from underrepresented backgrounds. Recently, we even helped an agency hire a senior account executive. The goal is to build a platform that helps young people understand the full scope of career possibilities in the industry, and it’ll be interesting to see how we grow and evolve over time.

Can you share any success stories or milestones achieved by talents that have gone through the Holiday Club?

Success is such a subjective thing! But for me a big marker of success with Holiday Club is the high completion rate of our summer school. These young people come in with little knowledge of what to expect, and for many of them, success happens daily as they try new things—whether it’s set design one week or photography the next. Just completing the program is a significant achievement.

Other milestones include partnerships with ITV that helped someone secure a job, working with yourselves to offer internships, and partnering with North6 to hire two individuals from our incubator into paid roles. Success isn’t just in getting hired—it’s about helping them understand the industry and seeing the opportunities they didn't know existed.

I'm also proud of how our magazine has grown. Last year, we had stockists like H-Town and Offspring, and we collaborated with major names in fashion. This year, we worked with Samuel Ross on a deep interview and collaborated with Yun and the Ambush team, which also feels like success. Seeing how these young people are shaping their own career paths is incredibly rewarding.

How did you hear about INK and what made you reach out?

I first heard about INK through Instagram and was immediately drawn to the work you were doing. I try to stay in tune with culture, fashion, and contemporary trends, and INK kept coming up, so I became really interested. After doing some research, I knew I wanted to collaborate for a while. Eventually we connected on LinkedIn and started talking about building the workshops. The attention to detail and care you showed really impressed me and I’m so glad we were able to make it happen.

Do you have any key takeaways from our workshop on the day?

A key takeaway for me from the workshop was seeing how enthusiastic the participants were after leaving. That’s always a great sign. It’s such a powerful and real testament to the impact we made. And again, what also stood out to me was the attention to detail and care, talking and having a group zoom beforehand etc. I felt like you guys were truly engaged and committed to delivering the best workshop possible and I also appreciated the patience and support from the INK team.

Looking ahead, what are your aspirations for the Holiday Club in the next few years? Do you foresee expanding into new sectors or geographic regions?

I definitely see expansion for Holiday Club over the next few years. Traditionally, we’ve operated as a charity focusing on summer workshops, but we've evolved beyond that. Now, with Holiday Club and Holiday Club Studios, we're expanding into recruitment, partnering with organisations to support diverse talent and ensure they feel supported. We're also growing in the media space, developing our magazine, and who knows—we might branch into podcasts or more video content. Holiday Club Studios, though still in its early stages, has exciting projects coming up, including the first film I’m executive producing under the studio.

In the coming years, I see us scaling up, offering more courses, programs, and media content while expanding in recruitment. The goal is to help and nurture more talent and become a place where people can turn for support and opportunities.

Learn more about Holiday Club here.