What 2025 Taught Us, and What We Expect From 2026

Every December I write a letter to the studio, and every December some of it escapes into this blog. This year the letter was harder to write, because 2025 refused to be summarized politely. It was the year our industry argued about everything at once: what is real, what is craft, what is worth paying for, what a team even is. It was also, quietly, the best year of work this studio has ever produced. Those two facts are related.

What 2025 taught us

The tools stopped being the story. In January, every kickoff included twenty minutes of AI discourse. By autumn, the tools had settled into the pipeline where they belong: everywhere, and beside the point. The work that won this year, the Møller identity, the Northwind holiday campaign, the film with the fog, won for reasons no tool can supply. Judgment, taste, nerve. Our engineering team ships faster than ever and our review culture is stricter than ever, and those are the same fact.

The market repriced humanity faster than anyone predicted. The authenticity backlash was the consumer story of the year, and we watched it move from social media dunking to procurement language. Clients now ask for evidence of human craft the way they once asked for digital-first thinking. We did not expect the pendulum to swing this fast. We were glad we had never let go of the craft end of it.

Slower is a strategy. Our sabbatical cohort returned with the ideas that shaped our best work. Our decision to keep shooting on location, keep drawing wordmarks by hand, keep printing things, all of it looked romantic in January and looked commercially shrewd by November. In a market flooded with the instant, patience became a differentiator. That still feels strange to write, and I believe it completely.

Measurement humility arrived. The zero-click reality forced our clients and our growth team into a more honest relationship with uncertainty. Fewer numbers, held more seriously. It made the strategy conversations better all year.

What we expect from 2026

Predictions are cheap in December, so we will keep ours few and falsifiable:

• Provenance goes mainstream. Some form of "how this was made" disclosure, on ads, on content, on products, moves from ethics discussion to standard practice, pushed by platforms and pulled by audiences. Brands with nothing to hide will treat it as a stage.
• The brand agent shakeout. Most of the AI chat experiences launched in 2025 will quietly disappear, and the survivors will be the ones built where dialogue genuinely adds information. Meanwhile, being well represented inside the platform assistants becomes a standing line item, as normal as SEO was in 2015.
• Editorial everything. The publication-as-brand-asset revival accelerates. At least a few major brands will launch print objects that get treated as cultural events. Type foundries will have a very good year.
• The junior renaissance begins. After two years of the industry under-hiring early-career talent, the smartest companies will notice the judgment pipeline running dry and start rebuilding apprenticeship on purpose. We are hiring three juniors in the first quarter, and we will teach them the way we were taught, with the tools of now.
• Craft keeps compounding. The gap between the average and the excellent will keep widening, in attention, in pricing power, in talent. We would bet the studio on it. In fact, we do, every year.

Thank you

To our clients, who kept choosing the braver option all year. To the team, who cared about details nobody asked them to care about. And to the fog on that Danish beach, which reminded us why we get on the plane.

See you in January. Rest well. The work will be there, and it will deserve us at our best.