The Corner Shop

The Corner Shop was founded in 2013 by Anna Hashmi, an Emmy- and BAFTA-winning, Oscar-nominated producer, and Peter Thwaites, a DGA-winning director. That founding pair still anchors the shop more than a decade later, a rarer thing in production than agency marketing copy tends to admit. The company operates from offices in Los Angeles and London, and has since added Sara Dunlop, an acclaimed director, as partner. The structure is small and named, not layered with holding-company management — the people who started the place are the people running it now.

Free Agency Media's review classified The Corner Shop as a confirmed independent, and the evidence holds up on direct inspection rather than inference. The founding statement is explicit: Hashmi and Thwaites started the company in 2013, and public materials identify them, along with Dunlop, as current partners rather than former founders retained for optics. There's no parent holding company sitting behind the letterhead, no acquisition trail to untangle. The verification drew on direct site research and a secondary confirmation pass, both converging on the same picture — a founder-led production company with a compact partnership structure, which is about as clean a read as this kind of check produces.

The Corner Shop's output speaks plainly to what a founder-and-partner structure can execute on. Its most recent documented project is a McDonald's campaign created by Leo UK, spotlighting Gen Z employees working at the fast food chain and built specifically to push back on negative stereotypes about young people in the workforce. Sara Dunlop directed the work, and The Corner Shop produced it — the kind of assignment that requires a production partner comfortable handling a culturally pointed brief for a brand as scrutinized as McDonald's. The campaign surfaced publicly in early April 2026, tied to films built around real employee stories rather than actor performances, which puts weight on directing and producing judgment rather than post-production polish alone. It's a useful data point: a company this size, with partners this directly involved in the work, isn't outsourcing its creative judgment to scale — Dunlop's name is attached to the direction, not buried in a credits list.

What distinguishes The Corner Shop's file is the consistency between its origin story and its current output. Companies founded by working directors and producers sometimes drift toward pure management once the founders stop directing; here, the partnership structure — Hashmi, Thwaites, and now Dunlop — appears to still be doing the work itself, not just owning the company that does it. For a production house built in 2013 and still led by its founders in 2026, that continuity is the more interesting story than any single campaign credit.