30 Years Young!

A fun wee video you can watch here that we created to walk down 3 decades of memory lane, celebrating 30 years!

If I am honest, we actually found it hard to source all our old memorabilia and film/photo footage, as it seems to have been lost on old back up tapes and CD’s. That’s how long ago 30 years is - long before the new world of the ‘cloud’.

I mean back when my late husband & I started the business, a cloud was a white fluffy ball in the sky, that you would try and guess what shape it was, as you lay in the cool long grass on a summers day. Simple stuff really.

How far we have come from fax machines, typesetting houses, and easels for presentation boards, to email, type libraries and Zoom!

As I reflect on 30 years, it is with a tinge of sadness that there seems to be less of the sheer collaboration & teamwork involved in launching a new brand or reinventing a Kiwi favourite.

There were always the quarterly brand planning days, where you had the client, the ad agency, the PR agency, the below the line agency, the media company and the design agency all in one room. Everyone contributed, listened, and made notes on the brand plans for the year ahead. The vision of the client objectives and a mutual spring boarding of ideas, as every partner specialised in their own deliverables bringing enormous value to the table. Always enjoyable, respectful and invigorating.

This seems to be a very rare action taken by clients now and as businesses in our creative sector become ‘jack of all trades’ ‘masters of none’, it seems the fate of brands is no longer as finely balanced. Using the right skills in the right areas to slowly continue to build brand momentum. Marketing teams are smaller and many skills are being lost. To be a marketer that is truly brand centric, as in building value through brand. Delivering true value as an asset to a business.

It now feels a trend for many brands to jump into the next shiny new thing that is catching on globally, which may have very little relevance to the right audience for the brand they are nurturing, but is the thing to do, as everyone else is doing it.

I feel proud to embrace the very fact, that we have survived 30 years, and have seen the turbulent world of design continue to evolve & change, as it always will.

Quite wonderful to look back and reflect and see my passion has not yet waned for the great reward of creating powerful, focused & disruptive design!

Annie D

1993-2024 and on…………….

See the video here.