Our Instagram is bare, I haven’t published an update in twelve months, and our website hides our case studies. But the firm is alive and well. Like the proverbial falling tree in an empty forest, if a design firm is born and no one is around to like the post, does it make a sound?
I am often lightly interrogated about what exactly it is that I do for work. “I run a design firm…designing brand identities…logos, yes, and typography, websites, interfaces, and a lot of writing…not just me, there’s a small team—”
“Oh—so it’s real!” people say. Their feigned interest turns into curiosity. In a city where family fortunes and alimony have turned the title of “creative director” into a meme, we’ve all become skeptics of each other. And so it follows that when people hear about Family Office—as small of a company as I feel it to be—having an office and employees and real clients, those facts make it a Real Company.
Real to whom?
Family Office is now an enterprise—with revenue, consistently made payroll, and growth—but that is table stakes. When I think of the projects, firms, and people I most admire, they’ve all achieved much more than mere admission to their category. In fact, they defy category.
Is Apple a computer company, or a design company who happens to make computers? Is Grant’s Interest Rate Observer a successful publication because of their raw research, or because of once-in-a-generation voice and contrarianism? Is Michael Lewis a sports journalist, a financial whistleblower, a football commentator, a macroeconomist, or a screenwriter? Is Dyson the vacuum manufacturer, the hair care company, or the vertical farming revolutionary?
The truly remarkable become singular by being happily divided in their loyalties to craft. Design and technology, journalism and narrative, objectivity and opinion, invention and adventure.
Some combination of my influnces will result in a life’s project that, I hope, can be counted both successful and distinctly unique. Even if at the moment the harmony and melody are just out of reach.
“The way you can go
isn’t the real way.
The name you can say
isn’t the real name.”
Tao Te Ching — Lao Tzu
translated by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Family Office
As of my last writing, I had only just formalized and named Family Office, a design and strategy practice born out of years of collaborative freelance work. If naming the firm was a first step towards becoming a real entity, many more footprints have been made in the past 12 months. Better yet, the concrete has yet to set.
- We are now a team of five full-time. Designers Laia Torrent Frugis, David Fetherston, and Jesse Yeonhoo Park are lead by a combination of me and Annie Swanson who runs operations and project management. Along the way, we’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with the incredibly talented freelancers Juan Pantoja, Michelle Belgrod, and Matija Gabrilo. Our Spring intern Dev Makker graduated from Parsons and is now working at The New York Times, and we’re joined this Summer by RISD student and intern Li Huang.
- We moved into a beautiful, bright studio in Tribeca. If someone was ever to believe that I work extremely hard specifically to move into and furnish beautiful spaces, they would only be half incorrect. Considering we’ve already had to rearrange to accommodate more people, I’m very grateful.
- Trailing twelve month revenue and EBITDA1 amount to $807,994.00 and $376,375.15 respectively. January of 2025 was an unfortunate lesson for me in the annual business cycle — few brand identity projects start in December, and low revenue for January brings down an otherwise respectable monthly average.
Since last writing, we’ve won assignments to work on a data center operation, two upstart energy firms, a venture capital firm, a private equity firm, a (literal) family office, a brick-and-mortar financier, an iconic American tights brand2, another agency, an AI concierge, an upstart social app, an entire portfolio of company incubations, two ad tech companies, an internet infrastructure company, and many more.
As Robert Heinlein once said, “Specialization is for insects.”
And for those interested in seeing case studies of our work, I am the one to blame for our firm not having published many case studies or assembled a proper website. (As the saying goes, “The cobbler’s children have no shoes.”) My inbox, however, is open.
Extracurriculars
Hosting a second-annual Terms-Eccles Tax Day Party was humbling on many fronts. For one, reaching out to possible speakers and/or guests was a hardening exercise in seeing emails go unanswered and receiving kind declines from staffers in the offices of a few centimillionaires/billionaires. (It was encouraging at least to know that my notes arrived at all.) And then, with only 10 days to spare, our venue backed out, and I fell very ill.
Somehow, it all came together, and for that I have mostly Annie Swanson to thank. She was hired only a few weeks before Terms-Eccles was set to happen, and thus the first few weeks of her role running operations for a design agency turned into scouting venues, confirming speakers, and managing the communications and guest list for a party on, of all days, Tax Day. Undeniably, if Annie had not been with the team, the event would not have occurred.
200+ people showed up throughout the night to listen to the conversation and socialize. I am grateful for each of our speakers’ participation:
- Brad Burnham co-founded a preeminent venture capital firm, the New York-based Union Square Ventures. The firm’s portfolio includes Twitter, Stripe, Coinbase, Tumblr, MongoDB, and Etsy among others. The firm’s 2004 fund was one of the best performing single funds in venture history.
- Macy Gilliam is the creator of MorningBrew’s Webby award-winning How Are You Still in Business series as well as her recently launched show, Out There.
- Sasha Mutchnik is the Senior Social Director at GQ, runs the @starterpacksofnyc account, and was previously a senior social editor for The Cut.
- David Carey covered the world of high finance as a reporter for Bloomberg News, The Deal, and Corporate Finance magazine while writing for Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Financial World. He is the author of the 2010 book about Blackstone, King of Capital.
We hosted the party at The Bench, whose team was extraordinarily gracious and accommodating, and the American memorabilia throughout the space proved to be perfect for a party on the evening of Tax Day.
Photos of the event were taken by Matt Weinberger and Tania Veltchev.
Costly Attempts
Along with cobbled together teams, I tried to start two separate software ventures during the last year. As concepts, I think they are deeply compelling and both could be breakthrough companies within their spaces. As ventures, though, they need full-time builders, which I was never quite able to afford, at least not without grinding away the income of Family Office.
And so, three projects sit untouched, many thousands of dollars sit absentee from the bank account, and I have learned a lesson to pursue only those pursuits which can be pursued wholeheartedly — either by raising money and hiring a team of people dedicated to it, or by focusing my attentions solely on the project.
On my mind
In other news
- I turned 24 on an October night with fifteen or so companions at the office.
- In February, movers hauled my life from the Financial District to the West Village.
- An April week in Paris to see a dear friend was my only air travel.
- Over most of the last twelve months, my calendar has been dotted on-and-off by evenings with a woman I have been at times enamored with, hopeful for, and discarded by. What started as circumstance turned into a pattern as predictable as the lunar cycle and in desperate need of new punctuation.
- Running has become a habit, whether done at 6AM, 5PM, or midnight.
- I’ve read some ~40 books over the past twelve months. Some favorites include Madonna in a Fur Coat, I Regret Almost Everything, Duveen, Northanger Abbey, Steppenwolf, When The Going Was Good, The Partnership, Seven Days in the Art World, In An Uncertain World, and Kitchen among others. These volumes all seem to me not only related, but necessarily so. There is a room where Jane Austen banters with Bob Rubin, and that room is in my head.
Footnotes
1 I am unable to speak for the broader design agency business, but I’d be very interested to know how other studios fare. Looking back, I’m realizing there has been much tumult: the election, tariff scares, and the outbreak of war have been a constant hum in the background of the past 12 months. I’m grateful to feel as though the time-tested formula of working extraordinarily hard is still working despite it all, and I hope only for an economy in which that continues to be true. I’m also very grateful that we work with many businesses relatively unaffected by tariffs, i.e., we don’t work with too many consumer brands.
2 A special shoutout is reserved for Britt Cobb , founder of a design studio called Cobbco who, yes, was a collaborator on a small portion of the Leggs rebrand, but later circulated Family Office’s work as their own among journalists. I met Britt 6 years ago when they invited me to the Pentagram offices with the blessing of a now-recently retired, extraordinarily kind partner of that firm. It was lovely to meet again, and though the situation was frustrating, I write this footnote with levity in hopes it’s the last time I ever have to contemplate the fellow.