Brand Side of the Table

As April rolls around every year, I find myself doing the same thing.
Looking back at the very first client 4040 ever had.

Next month marks the beginning of the 24th year of 4040. When you run a creative company that long, the milestones sneak up on you. But what sticks with me isn’t the years.

It’s the people and the projects that come back into focus.
The great clients.
The messy ideas.
The moments when something small turns into something much bigger.

One of the very first was a small coffee company in the Bay Area called Jeremiah’s Pick Coffee Co.

In the early days of 4040, the agency was few laptops in a cramped space in West Berkeley. Jeremiah was the founder. Real entrepreneur energy. The kind of client who believed brand mattered even when the company was still small. He came to us with a new product idea. Some kind of infused coffee line, if I remember right. Our job was to help bring it to life.

We named it:
J.O.E. — Java of Evolution.
Get it?

At the time it felt clever. Maybe a little too clever.

If I’m being honest, the creative itself wasn’t particularly great. It was early work. We were still figuring out who we were and how to translate business ideas into something meaningful through brand and design.

But that project taught me something that has stayed with me for three decades.

Brand work begins with belief.

Jeremiah believed his coffee could be something bigger. Our job was to help give that belief a name, a story, and a shape people could recognize.
 

Since then I’ve been fortunate to work with companies of every size. Startups around a table. Global brands. Even a few Fortune 100 organizations trying to reinvent themselves.

Different scale. Different stakes.
Same fundamental question:
What is the idea worth believing in?
That’s the work.

As we head into 4040’s 24th year, I’ve been thinking more about the lessons that only come with time. The patterns you start to notice after three decades in the business. The mistakes. The breakthroughs. The strange places where inspiration shows up.

So from time to time, I’ll share a few of those thoughts here.

Stories from the brand trenches.
Ideas about strategy and design.
Things that worked. Things that didn’t.

Nothing too formal. Just reflections from someone who has spent the last 30 years somewhere between the left brain and the right.
It started with a small coffee brand in the Bay Area.

And like that first product name we came up with all those years ago, the work continues to evolve.

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