When you reach a quarter-century in business, the temptation is to treat it like a summit—to plant a flag, look back at the ascent, and declare that you have finally mastered the mountain. This is the trap in hitting a big milestone. It's easy to lose perspective of where you, and culture, are going.
Spend any time in our studio at Moxie Sozo, and you’ll quickly learn that each summit is a myth. The view is nice, but the real work happens on the climb, and there is always another peak to reach. And we wouldn’t have it any other way!
Last year,
looking back at our first twenty-five years, I felt a lot of reverence. I thought 2025 would be a moment to catch our breath. Instead, the incline steepens as we set our sights higher. It became a year of clarification and forced us to ask not just
how we create, but
why we choose to create in a world changing so fast.
Year twenty-five was the one we left the trail and moved with our own compass. We're still on the route, albeit one that's less traveled.
And as we look toward the future, we aren’t resting on our history. We are using it as a foothold to reach for something bigger.
The Algorithm or The Genuine Article
The narrative of 2025 was a promise of efficiency. We faced the same headwinds you did: budgets getting tighter, timelines shrinking, and the pressure to just "feed the machine" growing louder every day. The world fell in love with the speed of AI, offering businesses a tempting trade-off of craft for speed.
Now, we haven’t run from the technology. We’re just not going to let it hold the map and tell us where to go. We know that as the world floods with automated content, the intentional, human elements of branding and partnerships become more valuable, not less.
That thought proved true. When we stood on the stage in Toronto this July to accept the
Ad Age Silver Award for Small Design Agency of the Year, it wasn’t just a nice souvenir to put on our shelves. It was validation. It proved that "differentiation first" isn't just a statement, but the way we succeed.
Building Systems, Not Statues
But awards don’t future-proof a business. Ideas do. That’s why 2026 is about rethinking success, for ourselves, our clients, and the entire industry.
For a long time, our industry has treated brands like monuments, building rigid, static systems, unveiling them with fanfare, and expecting them to stand unchanged for years. But you and I both know that the modern business cycle doesn't work that way. Culture scrolls hourly. Markets pivot daily. Trends cycle monthly. Strategies expire quarterly. Monuments can’t move to keep pace; they’ll crumble.
We’re done with that. We aren't here to hand you a "finished brand" and wish you luck, because there is no such thing as a "finished brand" anymore.
Instead, we are building living systems, ones that drive growth.
These brands start with an unshakeable core belief. Something so simple and true that a brand can renew itself endlessly around it. They maintain the agility to adapt to culture, shift with technology, and evolve without breaking. We’ve spent the last few years quietly fortifying our work with serious research and strategic capabilities for exactly this reason. We can build brands with an enduring belief that never changes, but the flexibility to navigate new and ever-shifting terrain.
The Next Climb
We are setting our sights high for the years ahead and we’ll be sharing more in the coming months.
The success of Moxie Sozo has never been about one person. It is the product of a collaborative culture, ever since I started here as an intern in 2009, that has spent a quarter-century "figuring it out" together. That is the energy we are bringing to 2026.
Business is hard. The market is noisy. The only thing that cuts through is a team that is enthusiastic about the outcome.
We are looking for partners who share that drive. Leaders who are tired of the path and believe, as we do, that the best way to predict the future is to design it yourself.
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