Instead of writing a public, well crafted announcement of my design studio’s acquisition and rebrand, I’m going to be lazy and sincere and just cc my private email to the Internet. What could go wrong?
I’d been instructed by a team that does such things that I should write some bullshit LinkedIn post to announce the acquisition, rename and reframing of the company where I work.
This is me, throwing in the towel.
Instead, here’s how I formally announced it to a company I actually know and care about. Here’s to lazy sincerity!
To: Various staff at Flow Systems
Hello Flow-ers,
Hope you’re having a great week.
As some of you already know, the biggest news since our acquisition by Mentally Friendly is that we’ve decided to rename Digital Eskimo to Future Friendly, which came into effect this week.
Rather than referring to any kind of grandiose futurism, this new name is about optimistically getting products and services ready for a complex future using strategic design. Our question to our audience is “Are your products and services future friendly? Are you ready to engage with complex ecosystems and opportunities?” Let’s all get future friendly!
Along with the rename is a renewed emphasis on service design: deepening our team’s focus on designing whole services with our clients, and merging our emphasis on building things with the Mentally Friendly team. Our brand and customer experience strategy work with you plays to our core Future Friendly strengths. And everything that we build for you will be by a hybrid FF/MF team — under the new model, we’re not really drawing distinctions.
We’re really excited about this move. For you, this means that we’re reaffirming our focus on helping you bridge your vision and your operations via a strategic design partnership. On a day to day basis, the other effect is that you’ll probably see more MF faces as we make things for you.
Flow’s business has been key to how we’ve seen ourselves over the past five years, and as you could imagine, you continue to play a key part in this new story we’re telling. Every week, we tell people that you’re literally inventing the future of cities. Under our new name, we hope to do our part in this for you, tomorrow and for the foreseeable future.
As ever, you first port call is through Scott, but FYI, the new email addresses of our most relevant staff to you are:
- Ben Hoh, Design Director: ben@wearefuturefriendly.com
- Jamie Madden, Managing Director: jamie@wearefuturefriendly.com
- Andrew Sedlak, Senior Service Designer: andrew@wearefuturefriendly.com
- David Gravina, Founder and Purpose Director: david@wearefuturefriendly.com
Cheers,
Ben
