We’ve grown another year older but don’t want to grow up.

By the calendar not bad pretty good turned 3 a few weeks back. But, we count SuperBowl Monday as our anniversary. It’s when we first landed on our name, and with that our tone and ethos for what we wanted to do.

3 is good right? Like, we got through the new business threshold. Plus the pandemic parts 1 & 2 and everything that brought with it. We’re still standing and that is no small win.

The past 12 months have been bloody huge. Not every month. Sometimes we were quieter. Much quieter. It was actually nice not to get wrapped up in a tailspin of worry that every day, hour and minute wasn’t accounted for. We always had leads on a few great gigs so we just had to trust that our approach was right and we’d land the projects and pitches.

And it turned out to be a great year. We designed our first NRL jersey. Saw two beverages that we’d help build hit the shelves in major national distributers. We won pitches against global network agencies. Pitched a horror film to a finance brand and weren’t laughed out the room - and then we bloody made it. And we are very, very, close to final confirmation on a big win. It’s a brand that we wrote on a coaster during that first SuperBowl, and the last on that list we dreamed would be incredible to get and have since converted. That list btw was ‘The Footy’, ‘A Beer’, and ‘those peeps’. When we wrote ‘The Footy’ we meant the NRL. We’ve been chuffed to work on multiple projects for them over the past 3 years, but we were so happy with our Magic Round work for ’22. Great restrained conceptual work for what is possibly one of the biggest party rounds of the year. ‘The Footy’ also grew last year, seeing us also dive into AFL with partnership work for Jim Beam across both codes. And my daughter started playing AFL so I had to learn the rules anyway. We’ve even started dabbling in motorsport - you’ll see that in the months to come.

The big thing we also wanted to achieve with NB ? PG was to not let the little briefs that we would never have gotten the opportunity to approach in our agency lives slip by. To that end we helped brand an incredible providore down in the shire called Fred’s. They’ve just gone through a little expansion so if you’re down that way check it out. Honestly seeing the branding we created for them laid down by hand as a mosaic on the main street of Cronulla was just as rewarding as seeing some of our big brand commercials on air. We’ve also helped brand a killer range of condiments for them, with the first batch of products rolling off the printers just last week. We’ve had the samples and are dying to try the final range.

I said we’re resisting growth, and that is 99% true. We’ve loved literally being hands on through the whole process in all of the above mentioned projects. I’d say we were both pretty good with clients already, but that has doubled down over the past 3 years. From initial conversation to final despatch our total immersion in each of our client and production relationships has been such a pleasure and such a benefit. I don’t know if I could be held at arms length from each step of the process ever again. It’s made our connections with our client and production partners better, and I would say had a huge positive impact on the work. I do like that Joel Pearson has to deal with the financial stuff though - look someone has to design and someone has to settle the books. But, we have grown a little with our incredible freelance producer Kristy Fransen helping us out so much last year. Through the tail end of a hectic post schedule last year we both got hit with the spicy cough and she basically ran the ship for us - so a huge thanks to her ?? It looks like she’ll be onboard for some bigger projects this year and we can’t wait to get stuck in.

And so for year 4 we’re going to try and maintain a growing list of new work without growing. It’s been incredible to have the freedom to make calls that don’t affect other people. To take risks and smaller paying jobs that aren’t always as financially rewarding but are immensely rewarding creatively. But look, if you have a big problem and a big budget we are absolutely all ears.

As always we’ll be marking our anniversary with some heavy Monday drinks watching a different kind of footy. We’ll be cheering on the Eagles for their Aussie/NRL connection in Jordan Mailata. Also I’ve got a bit of a thing for the Wrexham/Reynolds-Deadpool/McElhenney/Philli shared universe.

OH! We also got a new window in the studio this year. Not bad huh! The old Presets recording studio that we are based out of is sound proof no more!