The landlord told us he wants to fix the building's foundation. So we're packing up.
There's something nice about that. The address gets repaired, we leave. A studio holds an agency the way a stage holds a band. Useful while the lights are on. Not the thing itself.
Brand New Guys existed before Claes. It will exist after. The space gave shape to a chapter, but it never was the chapter. I keep returning to the question: what's the agency without the studio? What was it always, underneath the address?
The honest answer is the work. The people who keep showing up. The way we think out loud. None of that is wired into the radiators.
Most creative agencies sell the studio as proof of culture. The mood board wall. The coffee setup. The big window that gets tagged in everyone's Stories. There's nothing wrong with any of it. But it does mean the lease becomes the brand. When the lease ends, the identity starts looking for new wallpaper, and the next agency on this floor will arrive with their own coffee setup and the cycle continues.
We're trying something else. The agency, going forward, gets organized around outputs that don't need an address. Insights production. Travelling dinners. Work that moves with us.
Insights are the most natural place to start. They're how we already think. We pay attention to what's happening in a category, we extract the pattern, we make it useful to the client before they ask. An insight, in our hands, is the difference between "consumers want sustainability" and "your buyer mentioned the recycling bin three times in your intake call and didn't notice she was doing it." One is a category truth everyone has access to. The other is yours alone.
The studio was incidental to that. The thinking happened anywhere. A walk along West-Kruiskade at six in the morning. A bench at Blaak watching skaters botch the same trick. A hotel lobby in Lisbon. The output doesn't care where the input came from.
The other piece is community. We've been quietly hosting a travelling dinner. A small table, six to ten people, a different city each time. Tina from Palate. A Surinamese restaurateur in Den Haag. Someone from Accra who's never been to one of our talks. Food we didn't cater. A conversation that lasts until the candles get short and someone says, "OK, where are we doing the next one."
The dinner is the room now. The room moves. Amsterdam, Paris, NYC, Paramaribo next. The seating chart is the architecture.
There's a quieter reason for all of this. Client concentration. We've been heavier on a few accounts than is healthy for a creative agency. The travelling dinner expands the network in a way no LinkedIn campaign can. Conversations over food shift faster than conversations over decks. We come back from each one with three people who could become clients, partners, or sources of work that hadn't existed yet.
So the studio leaves. The dinner stays. The Insights leave with us. The relationships move into restaurants and hotel rooms and walks.
I kept going back and forth on whether to ritualize the move. There's a version where we throw the studio a wake. There's another version where we just leave.
Then I noticed something. The lease ends June 30. The day before Keti Koti, the Surinamese commemoration of the end of slavery. I'm Surinamese. My mother is. My son is. The building is closing on the eve of a day that's been in our family longer than any office, any ten-year lease, any agency.
That changed the question. We aren't deciding whether to ritualize. The calendar already did.
Join us 30th for a layered, special day.
The lease ends. The work continues. The foundation we're fixing isn't the one under the floor.