Getting emotional.

We love clients who want to stand up and tell the world about how proud they are of their brands. Better yet, they want to make them look as cool as they (and we) believe they are. So when an iconic Kentucky cult product shows up on your doorstep with stars in its eyes asking you to get it the attention it deserves, what else can you do . . . but help make it famous?

Call us devotees of good taste and supporters of small local businesses — or simply applaud the fact that when we see an opportunity to do good work with good people we jump on it — and especially when it involves free sourdough bread for life. The design work became loved and recognized throughout the city and was acknowledged not once, but twice by Lürzer’s Archive magazine. Win-win-win.

Highland Coffee was one of the first coffee shops in town. In fact, they became an institution. But sadly, after 23 years, the Pandemic took its toll in 2021 and their brick-and-mortar location in the Highlands closed. The location was core to the brand, of course, but the legacy and the quality of the coffee remained, and so we were asked to position them as an online brand. We drove the initiative with a campaign of five custom-illustrated letterpress posters based on the caffeine-inspired tagline “What Are You Up For?” supplemented with a refreshed logo, a range of t-shirts, mugs, and sundry other tchotchkes.

The social injustice demonstrations of 2020 left a mark. Especially in Louisville. It happened in the belly of the pandemic and most of us felt powerless to do anything meaningful. But we knew that we could at least develop messaging that might contribute to raising awareness, and maybe even a little money to help support the critical work being done by Black Lives Matter and Louisville Urban League.

“Welcome to a place suspended in time, somehow separated from the distractions and headaches of the twenty-first century, attracting wanderers, tourists, road warriors, and dreamers alike. It’s a place rich in history, rich in surprise, and richer still in the kind of warmth it engenders among those who stay a while and escape the modern world’s complications, divisiveness, and superficiality.”

We’re a small, ambitious group of passionate brand-first doers, thinkers, makers, pluggers, scrappers, creators, and dreamers. With decades (and even more decades) of award-winning-client-pleasing-high-ground-taking-hyphen-loving experience among us, we come in every day driven by one thing — to do the very best work with friends. And so, to paraphrase Wren, if you seek our monument, we invite you to look at our portfolio.

We like to think of ourselves as traditional-minded, but not old-fashioned. We believe that things should be done properly the first time. That deals can and should made on the sincerity of a handshake. That you don’t stop until everything’s right. In that shared spirit, and for want of a better phrase, we get on with the remodeling crew at French like a house on fire. Every year we do a series of three mailers that reflect how much value they can bring (forgive us again) to the table.

Once upon a time, a successful senior executive said to himself, ‘Screw all this. I want to help troubled young adults not only find their purpose in life, but equip them with the personal, social, and even professional tools to make a go of it.’ And so he embarked on transforming this passion into a reality, retaining us to help him name, brand, and communicate his company’s value into something that has now grown into a nationally recognized coaching platform.

You might have heard of the Gracies, a prestigious Oscars-like awards show named after Gracie Allen. The Gracies are a production of Alliance for Women in Media, an international association created to inspire female leaders. AWM asked us to build a website (or two) and help them with online advertising. As part of the project, we also developed AWM’s 70th Anniversary identity system, including the Voices name.

When based in Kentucky, everything and anything ends up being connected to bourbon, thoroughbreds, or fried chicken. And while we’ve yet to work on a fried chicken or a fried horse account, we do have bourbon-barrel-loads of experience. Cruise offers wooden merchandise ranging from six-foot-wide flags to bottle openers, each hand-crafted by veterans, which we share through inventive digital messaging.

What’s the worst part of air travel? The canceled flights? The stale peanuts? The kid in front of you who everyone agrees needs to get off the plane midair? Well, Newport News realized there wasn’t anything they could do about any of that, but what they could do was become an ‘invisible airport.’ Newport News is a place that almost vanishes. No long lines. No waits. And, because of its location, getting there and back again is a snap. Everything is easy going.

Despite being one of the better-known architecture firms in the region, recognized as much for its fun bright orange logo as its insightful, creative design, Work approached us about updating its identity to match its evolution to a larger and more sophisticated company. The assignment grew from an acknowledgment that Work‘s strength lay in its ability to uncover and communicate the exceptional.

Sandy Hook Promise, a national nonprofit organization founded by families whose loved ones were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, and Whitney/Strong Organization, a Kentucky group committed to finding commonsense solutions to end gun violence, came together in early 2022 to help President Biden pass his landmark federal gun-reform bill. Shortly after the law was enacted, we deployed this common-ground statewide outdoor / digital campaign to support the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s commitment to continue to cross the aisle on this critical initiative.

As America’s fastest-growing bourbon, Rabbit Hole doesn’t lean on its heritage and Kentucky roots, but stands up and says, proudly, “We’re the adventurers who give rise to ‘What’s next?’ The iconoclasts who ask ‘Why not?’ And the extraordinary who say ‘We will.‘” It’s a bourbon crafted to appeal to those who cherish their individuality, and who, through a life inspired by imagination and love, seek exceptional friendships and experiences. ‘The Wonderful Party’ tells their story in a way that gives a colorful, grateful nod to the brand’s wellspring, and the Sundance Film Festival work acknowledges Rabbit Hole’s place in the pantheon of creative and ambitious souls.

Breakfast in the south is a very serious business. So cue: Wild Eggs, a large, rapidly growing breakfast-food restaurant chain, which over the last decade has become one of the premier players in the marketplace. The interiors reflect their casual-but-fun-and-fresh take on cooking, an aesthetic we were asked to emulate in our social media work for them. Families, smiles, lots of light and color . . . and of course eggs.

When the 2023 Kentucky legislature started making ominous noises about limiting the rights of transgendered people with SB 150 — known as the ‘Anti-Trans Bill’ — we realized it threatened to drive marginalized communities out of the Bluegrass to seek security elsewhere. Working with a small group of partners, principally Queer Kentucky, an LGBTQ+ non-profit that champions queer culture in the commonwealth, we developed the ‘Stay Here’ campaign, built on supportive messages, rather than incendiary ones.

With venues like the Trail Hotel and Bardstown Motor Lodge and Toogie’s Restaurant in Bardstown, Paseo Restaurant in Louisville, and Ashbrook Hotel and Restaurant and the Broadway Project in Frankfort, we do a lot of hospitality and destination work. But the jewel in the crown, at least for us, was getting to work on the Myriad Hotel’s launch. In addition to being housed in a repurposed factory that once manufactured 90 percent of the world’s disco balls, it had a pool. And a fancy Mediterranean restaurant. And Switchboard, a coffee shop / cocktail bar. And best of all, an endless parade of local weird and colorful customers.

How do seven community banks gain market share in the shadow of too-big-to-fail? By working together. With well in excess of $1 billon in assets, First Breckinridge Bancshares serves banking communities across the state, boasting seven distinct bank brands in its portfolio. In keeping with FBB’s commitment to honoring every location’s individuality, each bank had its own identity system. Campaigning on the phrase ’Where we come from,’ we leveraged FBB’s Kentucky roots. By emphasizing the banks’ fealty to their clients and their values, we developed a shared position with a joint-but-differentiating system of aesthetics.

Our client Rabbit Hole came to us with an outrageous-but-turned-out-it-was-true-after-all story of a woman with nine children, a distillery, and an international bootlegging operation. Mary Dowling was the first female distillery owner and operator in the US, but she had the ill fortune of coming to prominence at the very worst time, Prohibition. Her legend and the bourbon it inspired live on in this fine whiskey, a testament to the woman we subsequently and appropriately dubbed the ’Mother of Bourbon.‘

You wouldn’t believe how much money there is in scrap metal and recycling. It’s an enormous industry nationally and internationally and the stakes for credibility and awareness are high. So it’s critical to present brands in ways that smash through the noise. In this case, literally, because this campaign was all about heavy metal. Aimed squarely at a hard-working-blue-collar-roll-your-sleeves-up type of crowd, mainly male, and predominantly fans of rock and roll, we created some smashing video content, attention-grabbing outdoor boards and collateral, a stadium takeover, and to top it all off, an opening event starring an appropriately loud and gnarly metal band.

With 17 stores (and growing), Heine Brothers had ramped things up in 2023 with a national online subscription service. And to make things even more interesting, they’d begun to pivot away from being a small neighborhood brick-and-mortar coffee shop toward a cooler kind of brand, one that went head to head with Starbucks for a more youthful audience. By consolidating the brand with the tagline ‘Something Good Happens Today,’ we kept the personal sense of warmth and familiarity, but hitched it all to a larger, positive, optimistic, and elevated position about companionship and shared community.

It’ll come as no surprise to learn that the urban Black population is under-served when it comes to mental health treatment. This discrepancy is compounded by the stigma many Black men and youth experience as they have to grapple with mental illness’s challenges. University of Louisville and Louisville Metro coordinated with our client, NAMI, to raise awareness of this issue. We developed the MindOurMind outdoor and digital campaign by leaning into how resilient and resolved someone has to be to tackle the problem.

Western Reserve Academy has been consistently ranked high among the nation’s top boarding and day schools, and 100 percent of the graduates go on to attend four-year colleges or universities — many at the most selective schools in the world. It’s a hidden secret in a small town in Ohio, and it takes its communications to the outside world seriously, demanding only award-winning creative work.

We always err on the side of inclusivity and diversity, which means we’ll always try to find a way to support kindred advocates when they need help with messaging. We were approached by the pastor of a Lutheran assembly and asked to rename and brand them. The congregation is characterized by its exceptionally eclectic and accepting spirit, and is established to appeal to and nourish people who can’t find a home among more conventional belief groups.

Betting is essentially a 50-50 proposition, but when you deduct what the house takes, the only way you can win your money back is by beating the odds. And to do that, you need more than a rabbit’s foot and healthy living, which is where the OddsR app comes in. Using impressive calculations, the app gives the user just enough of an edge to beat the system over time. The work below is from our 2024 campaign starring OddsR, a robot we built from rabbits’ feet and broccoli cartons.