Well well well. Coming in with an unnecessary psa to announce we’re finally emerging from the woodwork (!) and getting back to our favorite thing of all: blocking up your inboxes with our musings. As I have lamented on so many occasions, turns out the longer you leave something the harder it is to get back into it, so bear with us as we find our rhythm again. To kick it all off, 9 things (it was 10 but Substack said I reached my email length limit) that have been happening studio side in September.
1) First cab off the rank, we have moved offices!
We’re now reporting live from inside Index Space in Chinatown (and yes, it feels quite nice to say that). Index opened up a new floor of coworking so we jumped on the opportunity to have our pick of the desks (Shy tested each spot to find “the one” as seen below). Happy to report we are both satisfied with our choices and ready to live our new Manhattan life. If you work locally, hit us up and lets get lunch/drink/something.
2) We just spent a few days with some of the best creative minds in the world at Paradigms, a brand experience summit. And it was on an island in Croatia.
It was as good as it sounds. We heard about the trends shaping the future (cc Chris Danton), how brands need to act like hosts (cc Collins), we even heard from the Creative Director of NASA. There were endless cocktails, buffets, activities, amazing conversations… and even dolphins. You can read a Linkedin post for a little more info,
But most of all (and I’m not sure if it was intentional) but barely any talks were about AI? This felt the most refreshing of them all because every conference over the last 2-3 years has had AI as the dominant theme. Hopefully this means we’re moving away from “what does AI mean for creativity” and instead going back to talking about creativity itself. Finally.
3) We spent a weekend exploring Korčula
Post conference, we jumped on the ferry to Korčula with two dear friends Chloe & Mags. Here we spent a few days enjoying the local wines, island hopping by water taxi, and savoring fresh produce and local treats. Twas heavenly. Twas recharging.
Best of all was wandering down tiny winding streets to find little galleries and souvenir shops. This was how we came across the work of Neno Mikulić, whose work comes to life as this amazing obscure and quirky characters. Our first choice was bringing home one of the clay sculptures before realizing its chances of making it back in one piece were slim… so settled on one of the artworks instead.
4) Work has kept us booked n’ busy
Happy to report we have lots on the cards at the minute, with many exciting projects and fingers in all sorts of different pies (which keeps us out of the repetitive work loop which is always nice).
Bit of branding, IRL activations, digital, lots of packaging, a few campaigns and plenty of things in between. Won’t bore you with work updates unless you enjoy it (?) but excited to get some of this stuff out into the world pronto. Was trying to find some pics to share alongside but realised mostly everything is unreleased or under NDA. The perils of studio life!
5) On the subject of work, we’ve been town halling about our positioning (as has everyone right now it seems?).
September has been heavy on the reflection, thinking about our positioning, and with that, the kind of clients we love to work with, the projects we want to build, and where we want the studio to go in 2027 (I’m starting to use language such as “next year” - yuck!).
Like all good things this has resulted in a deck that feels like a pretty good summary of where we want to head. Now I just need to find time in Shy’s calendar for it to have the design attention it needs, as ultimately I want this to be what we share with potential clients.
Which brings me to you, potential clients / people who hire studios / people who recommend studios… want to take a look? I would love to know if it tells you what you need to know, what’s missing, or what you’d want to see before deciding to work with us. Open to opinions, thoughts, etc.
6) The last quarter of the year is looking to stay booked n busy, so we’re wanting to expand our network of freelancers and collaborators!
It’s time to refresh the old Rolodex of talent. We received some pretty good advice on this: create a form for people to fill out with details like portfolio, bio, availability, location etc., and then plug all this data into a Notion database. Instead of our inbox becoming a black hole where we inevitably lose track of all the talented people who reach out, we’ll finally have one place to keep finding them. Smart!
I’m working on this form & database now, so if you’ve wanted to work with us keep an eye out as it should be live in a week or so. One big question I have is whether we should have a question that asks about day rates or not? If you have strong thoughts on this, let me know.
7) We attempted to do a TikTok.
It went terribly. You can view it here.
8) We are interested in throwing some dinners. Putting this out into the world.
After the hospitality at Paradigms (and then many conversations around getting offline), we’ve been interested in hosting some dinners with all sorts of people: founders, creatives and people from completely different worlds, with the idea of getting everyone around a table and seeing what interesting conversations come out of it. Would you be interested in coming? Or interested in partnering on one? Hit me up.
9) Finally, we are trying our hardest to assimilate by using American spelling
Despite the protests of my computer and subsequently every program we happen to use, we’re trying to use American spelling and date formatting. Let it be known however that I do not see Fahrenheit over Celsius ever being in my future.
Well that’s it for now, you reached the end of nine news updates from After Hours. See you in October.