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.

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.

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.‘

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.