Treebird Branding: One year in a row!
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes. How do you measure a year? We're kidding. . . sort of.
But there’s one big question here. After a year of throwing ourselves and our time and our calories and our brains and our coin into this work, what’s changed?
Well, on the surface, we now have a new employee, graphic designer Paloma Schultz, who had enough of Savannah and decided to make a go of it in the A. She joined Treebird in November and fits right in, which is sort of miraculous, because we’re weird. We have a new office, in the Telephone Factory Lofts, where no dogs bark, lick, or lap-sit as we work. But beyond that, there’s something else that was hard to name for a while, but which lies at the core of what we do and why we do it.
We’re less cynical.
Now that doesn’t mean we aren’t hyper-critical of glibness or ignorance or boorish behavior or bad design or flabby writing or sloppy thinking or the rote following of the status quo. . . we wouldn’t be creative professionals if we comprised those ideals. It just means we regard humanity with a bit more compassion, patience, and empathy.
As we said on this blog six months ago:
I mean, how fortunate can you be to have the opportunity to take what you love, take what you’re good at and developed and honed over the years, and tell one small corner of the world, “Hey, we love this and we’re good at it and we’ve developed and honed our craft and philosophy over the years,” and have at least some very small portion of that one very small corner say back, “Hey, you’re right. We’re a little bit impressed by you. Let’s work together so that I too can become better and grow and sustain my business.”
Six months later, that still holds true, and so we can cite Confucius and Rent and be sort of ironic about it but mostly, actually, believe in it. And that’s probably the best thing about Treebird: believing in our clients, knowing that they believe in us, and letting good intentions on both sides lead to growth, transformation, and mutual fulfillment.
"But doesn’t branding have to be evil and exploitative?!" I’ve read Naomi Klein! So have we. And we don’t work with Nike, so, there’s that. But if you think about branding as conversation, as clarification, as match-making, as partnership, as earned trust meets passionate artisanship meets expertise and good will, then, evil never even has to come into the equation. What a concept.
Nietzsche said, “Become who you are!”
We’re in the business of doing just that—for ourselves, and for our clients.
With gratitude and fortitude,
The Treebird team
