Photo credit: Sheffield United
In the image: The Vaughans at the home of The Blades, Bramall Lane, Sheffield.
Article by Christina Vaughan, 15 October 2026
This week, I joined a panel at the iconic Magna Science Adventure Centre for the unLTD Business Expo, alongside some truly inspiring business leaders from our region, including Will Islip of SBD Apparel, Alicia Hewitt of Secure Power ,Chris Hudson MBE of CHIMO Holdings and Steve Rimmer of Tickets for Good We talked about connection, local visibility and building businesses with international reach.
It was an energising session organised by the wonderful Andy Hanselman and Jill White of 3D Connect. There were plenty of enlightening discussions, but three words stayed with me in particular: Made in Sheffield.
Chris Hudson spoke about the significance of that name. The Made in Sheffield organisation describes it as one of the few city trademarks recognised throughout the world. We are accustomed to seeing countries named as places of origin—Made in Italy, Made in China—but a city whose name carries its own international reputation is something rather special.
It made me wonder whether I have spent so long looking outwards that I have sometimes underestimated the name on my own doorstep.
Most of my working life has been international. From founding Image Source to building Cultura Creative, my businesses have depended on relationships across borders: understanding international customers, working with creative talent and bringing images to markets far beyond the places where they were commissioned.
Yet I still find myself introducing Cultura to people here at home who have little idea of what we do. There is an interesting gap between international reach and local recognition. This week’s event reminded me how valuable it is to close it. When we understand what the businesses around us are achieving, we become better placed to recommend one another, collaborate and open doors.
What does a city of makers make today?
Sheffield’s reputation was earned through making things well. Steel and cutlery have carried its name far beyond South Yorkshire for generations. That reputation belongs to the people whose skill and work built it, and to those who continue that manufacturing tradition today.
My own work involves a different kind of production, but hearing about that heritage made me consider what we have in common.
At Cultura, we make imagery. We bring together photographers, filmmakers, producers and participants to create content for international customers, using technology to support how we produce and deliver it. An increasingly significant part of our work is producing datasets for AI training.
These are digital products, but their quality depends on very human decisions.
Who should be represented? What does each participant understand about the use of their image? Have they been paid? Are the permissions clear? Does the finished work meet the customer’s brief?
Our answers take practical form in casting, informed consent, model releases, payment and careful production. For a customer commissioning an AI dataset, those details are part of the product’s value. An image needs to be useful for the intended task, but the customer also needs to understand its origins and the rights attached to it. Scale alone cannot answer those questions.
This is where my years in image licensing meet a new market. Understanding how content was created, what permissions were obtained and how it can be licensed has long been central to our business. AI gives that expertise another application.
For me, that brings a familiar idea of quality into a new setting: take responsibility for what you produce, and give your customer good reason to trust it.
Local roots, international relationships
Building a business from Sheffield has never meant limiting its horizons.
When I built Image Source, we were enormously proud to trade in 80 countries through an exceptional international network. We founded the company in London, opened offices in New York and Los Angeles, and acquired a business in Germany.
I loved London and the team we built there. But founding a business in Sheffield,the city where I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life has brought a different, deeply personal sense of pride.
At Cultura, our international work depends on production teams and participants in different countries, each bringing knowledge we could not simply supply from a distance. Understanding a place, its people and its cultural context is essential to making imagery that feels credible and authentic.
That understanding matters in AI production too. If we want technology to work for people across different societies, we need to pay attention to whose lives and experiences are represented in the material used to train it.
International business requires curiosity, listening and the patience to develop relationships. Those are qualities I intend to keep investing in as we strengthen existing partnerships and build new ones in the USA, Japan, China and other markets.
Our ambition is to keep learning what customers need and show where our experience can make a meaningful contribution. Being proud of where we come from gives us confidence in those conversations. It should also make us curious about where other people come from.
A name carries a promise
What struck me about Made in Sheffield was the connection between a place and an expectation.
A place of origin can tell a customer something meaningful, provided the work continues to earn the reputation attached to it.
That feels especially relevant when digital content can travel around the world in seconds, often becoming detached from the circumstances of its creation. Knowing who made something, how it was produced and what permissions accompany it helps customers make informed decisions.
A city’s reputation and a dataset’s provenance are different things, but both depend on trust supported by evidence.
For Cultura, being based in Sheffield is very much part of our identity. The responsibility is to make that identity meaningful through the quality of our work and the way we conduct our business.
Across South Yorkshire, global ambition becomes tangible through businesses finding customers, developing partnerships, delivering on commitments and earning the next commission.
Local connections can help that happen. An introduction to a potential partner, a production location, a university researcher or an experienced exporter can turn a promising idea into practical progress.
That is the opportunity I see in becoming better connected here at home: understanding more of what we can achieve together, and helping one another reach further.
Discovering the makers around us
We are experiencing this first-hand through our current photography project exploring women working in STEM and industry. Whilst many people may recognise global powerhouses such as Sheffield Forgemasters and the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), it is some of the lesser-known businesses that have particularly caught our attention.
Our production team keeps discovering remarkable companies across Sheffield and South Yorkshire: innovative, highly skilled and often guided by a strong ethical approach, yet still flying under the radar outside their specialist networks.
Through conversations and visits, we are learning about the work they do and the values behind it. Technical ambition often sits alongside care for people, pride in craftsmanship and a thoughtful approach to running a business.
Photographing these workplaces gives us an opportunity to make that expertise visible: the women building careers in technical fields, the different generations working together and the skills that turn an idea into something useful.
There is a lovely connection here. We are a Sheffield creative business helping to tell the stories of other businesses in our region, creating imagery for an international audience. Their work gives substance to the story we want to share about South Yorkshire.
It also brings me back to something I spoke about on the panel: seeing someone like yourself in a role can help you imagine a future there. Making women in STEM visible broadens people’s understanding of who belongs in these industries and what a career here might look like.
The more we discover, the more I feel that part of our contribution is to help this talent be seen here at home, and around the world.
Making room for the conversation
The same curiosity helped shape The Image Makers, the podcast we are developing with Heather Stewart-Whyte and Stephen Mayes.
We bring different experiences of the image world, but share a desire to explore how images influence our lives: who gets seen, how beauty is defined, what makes an image powerful and how technology is changing its creation and use.
Recorded here in Sheffield, those conversations address questions that travel well beyond it. Images cross borders every day. The assumptions and values they carry deserve discussion across borders too.
The podcast is another expression of a working life that feels rooted here and connected to the wider world.
Coming home with a wider view
When I left Sheffield at 18, I was hungry to explore everything the world had to offer. There was some teenage recklessness in that departure, and a desire to escape the familiar.
It was also the mid-1980s, in the aftermath of the miners’ strike and amid the devastating contraction of the steel industry. Those changes shaped how the future felt to a young person growing up here.
Four decades later, I see my home city through different eyes. I bring back the experience, relationships and perspective I gained elsewhere, alongside a renewed appreciation of what was here all along.
There is much to take pride in. Harry Brearley’s development of stainless steel helped transform everyday life. Sheffield was also home to Britain’s first women’s suffrage organisation in 1851,a history that feels particularly meaningful to me as a female founder working to broaden representation.
Its influence can be heard in the electronic experimentation of Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League and Heaven 17, and in the international success of bands such as Def Leppard, Pulp and Arctic Monkeys. These artists took distinctive voices and sounds from this city to audiences around the world.
Our ambition has travelled further still: Sheffield’s Helen Sharman became Britain’s first astronaut in 1991. For a project making women in STEM more visible, her example feels especially powerful.
And, as a Blade, I cannot overlook Bramall Lane, the world’s oldest major stadium still hosting professional football, and the setting for the world’s first floodlit football match in 1878.
It still gives me shivers to imagine that moment: the lights coming on, the pitch emerging from the darkness, and a familiar game becoming something people could experience in an entirely new way. I wonder whether those watching felt they were seeing a glimpse of the future.
That thought takes me back to my own first understanding of AI’s potential,the excitement, the uncertainty and the dawning realisation of how quickly our world could change. Across almost 150 years, there is something deeply human that connects those moments: trying to comprehend what a new technology might make possible, before we can fully know where it will lead.
That inventiveness continues today. Sheffield businesses are developing robotic intelligence inspired by insect brains and liquid cooling for the data centres supporting AI. Opteran and Iceotope are two examples of local expertise addressing international challenges. Alongside celebrating what Sheffield gave the world, we should be paying attention to what is being developed here now.
Returning has made me want to contribute to what comes next.
For Cultura, that contribution will be through the imagery we create, the people we represent, the datasets we produce and the international relationships we build.
I left Magna with a renewed appreciation of what Sheffield’s name represents, and a stronger desire to help carry that reputation forward.
Sheffield has given the world good reasons to recognise its name. I want our work to give people another.
Made in Sheffield. Serving the world.
Christina Vaughan
Founder & CEO, Cultura Creative
15th October