The meetings and events division of travel management company FCM has acquired UK-based brand experience agency Fresh for an undisclosed sum.
The deal, which marks FCM M&E’s first-ever acquisition, will bring all 65 Fresh employees, including its management team, into FCM’s UK operations. It will also add offices in Manchester and Edinburgh to the TMC’s existing London base and will significantly expand its headcount to close to 100 employees.
“This is a game-changing moment for FCM M&E and our clients across EMEA,” said Frits de Kok, head of meetings & events, EMEA.
Speaking to BTN Europe, de Kok said FCM’s M&E business in the UK has seen a 50 per cent year-on-year increase in revenue between 2025 and 2026, with several “warm leads” in the experiential marketing space. “That gives us the confidence that this is the place to invest,” he said.
While the company previously outsourced creative production capabilities to deliver full-scale brand experiences in the UK, de Kok said the acquisition will bring “the magic of delivery” in-house.
“The fresh acquisition doesn't just expand our footprint… it fundamentally transforms what we can deliver for customers,” he said. “We see a real trend with more and more global companies creating a procurement-led approach to M&E, and more and more are trying to combine [managed travel and strategic meetings management]”.
He also noted that corporates are increasingly looking at ways to better manage experiential marketing spend and even consolidate suppliers within the marketing funnel.
“There is a lens of ‘how do we demonstrate better ROI? How do we get better visibility?’ And as TMCs, we really have an opportunity to demonstrate [the power of] a single operating model, a single tech stack, and what we call ‘a one best way’ from a pricing and service delivery point of view. All of those things, we can demonstrate really well as a TMC, but we also must have the capabilities of delivering the ‘wow’,” de Kok said.
FCM isn’t the first TMC to invest in brand engagement capabilities that extend beyond procurement, sourcing and strategic meetings management to also include creative concept development and AV production.
BCD M&E in 2025 announced plans to scale its in-house creative agency, The Collective, into the EMEA, LATAM and APAC regions after first launching in the US and UK in 2021.
American Express Global Business Travel also introduced its own in-house event production division, The Experience Studio, in 2024 and last July appointed Rich Atkinson-Toal to lead the studio as global vice president.
Rather than organically building up these capabilities, de Kok said FCM found “the right partner” in Fresh, which includes the likes of Visa, Vodafone, M&S and Siemens among its existing client base.
“This wasn't an opportunistic acquisition,” he added. “We actively searched for the right partner in the UK.”
de Kok confirmed that FCM M&E’s existing UK team will merge into Fresh, with Lee Harris, Fresh CEO, to take charge of the combined business as UK managing director. The Fresh brand will be phased out “in due course” and the agency will be folded into the global FCM M&E offering.
“We will develop, over time, how we better position this offering… and we will definitely involve Fresh in developing that proposition,” de Kok said.