In April 2024, an email landed in our inbox that changed everything.
"I'm looking to potentially host a media event at your workshop. Also — if we wanted to commission people to help create a large-scale project, do you do this?"
It was from a PR agency called Ready10. The sender's name was Georgie. She was cagey about the details, as she should have been. What she was about to ask us to make was, at the time, strictly confidential.
We said yes before we fully understood what we were agreeing to.
At the time, Cheeky Studio was barely a year old. We were based in a corner of Hackney Wick that most people in London had never heard of. We had a small, tight-knit team, a growing pile of five-star reviews, and exactly zero experience making a rug the size of a billboard.
Over the next few weeks, as the emails went back and forth, we started to piece together what this project actually was. A TV show. A major actor. A PR stunt that needed to be ready in a matter of weeks. The brief evolved almost daily — from small face rugs to a 5m×5m installation, then down to a 3m×6m billboard rug, to be hung outside a pub in Essex in time for a launch event.
There were moments when our team debated whether to walk away. This was bigger than anything we'd attempted. The timeline was brutal. The budget negotiations were tense. And nobody had ever made something like this in the UK, as far as we knew.
We didn't walk away. We said we could do it, and then we figured out how.
When the NDA landed and the full brief was shared, it all clicked into place.
The client was Sky. The show was Mr Bigstuff — a new comedy series set in a carpet shop, starring Danny Dyer as Lee, a loud, lovable alpha male who crashes back into his brother's life carrying a biscuit tin full of their dad's ashes. The show was launching on Sky Max on July 17, 2024.
And the PR idea? Beautiful in its simplicity: immortalise Danny Dyer himself as a giant handmade rug. Then reveal it to him at his local pub. Film his face.
The image we were working from showed Danny reclining on a rug in a women's kimono — the kind of image that works perfectly as a campaign visual and is absolutely nightmarish to reproduce in yarn.
We got to work.
The first problem was the frame. You cannot walk into a tufting supply shop and buy a 3×6 metre frame. Nothing like this existed — at least not in any tufting studio we knew of. We had to design and build it ourselves, working out the engineering as we went.
Then came the sketch. Taking a high-resolution photograph of a person and translating it into a design that can be tufted — with the right level of detail, the right colour separations, recognisable at distance — is a painstaking process. We went through multiple rounds of revision. Every time we thought we had it, something wasn't quite right.
And then, about halfway through the tufting itself, we hit the moment that nearly broke us.
The skin tone was wrong.
Danny Dyer, rendered in the yarn colours we'd chosen, looked too dark. Too warm. It wasn't right, and we knew it. So we made the call that no one wants to make halfway through a six-week project with a fixed deadline: we pulled it apart and started again on his face.
The original version — the one with the wrong skin tone — still hangs on the wall of our studio today. It's a reminder.
The final numbers, as reported in the press: 425 hours of handwork. 36 colours of yarn. A finished rug measuring 3 metres by 6 metres, made entirely by hand in a studio in Hackney Wick.
We worked nights. We worked weekends. We tracked progress in photos and sent updates to the Ready10 team every few days. When the deadline arrived, we delivered.
The rug was transported to The Fox Inn at Matching Tye, near Epping in Essex — Danny Dyer's local. It was mounted on a billboard outside the pub. And then Ryan Sampson, Danny's co-star in Mr Bigstuff, brought him there under some pretext and filmed the moment he saw it.
He was genuinely stunned. His exact words, on camera, were the kind of reaction that makes six weeks of near-sleepless work feel worth every hour.
Danny Dyer shared the video to his 1.4 million Instagram followers. The campaign generated over 600,000 organic views, a 4.56% engagement rate, and more than 50 pieces of press coverage. The news article that covered the making of the rug named Jaymond Ahn and Jenny Kim — Cheeky Studio's founders — as the creators.
Mr Bigstuff launched on Sky Max on July 17, 2024. It was renewed for a second series before the year was out. Danny Dyer won the BAFTA for Best Male Performance in a Comedy Programme in 2025 for the role.
And somewhere in the corner of our studio, the original version of his face — the one we pulled apart — still watches over the workshop.
Looking back, we were a small studio operating on instinct and adrenaline. We'd never done anything at that scale. We didn't have a playbook for a 3×6 metre commission, for NDA-protected TV campaigns, for building frames that didn't exist yet.
What we had was a team willing to say yes before we knew how, and the stubbornness to follow through when it got hard.
That's still how we approach every custom commission that comes through our door — whether it's a wall piece for someone's living room or a large-scale installation for a brand. Handmade means every hour shows. We'd rather put the hours in properly than cut corners on something that's going to live on a wall.
If you've got a project in mind — a bespoke rug for your home, a brand commission, an installation, or something that doesn't quite fit into any category — we'd love to hear about it.
We've made rugs for Sky, Meta, PayPal, and Dr Martens. We've made pieces for living rooms, boardrooms, and pub walls in Essex. Every project starts with the same question: what are you trying to make, and how can we help you make it?
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