To Start

Origins are tricky. But then, so is existence. 

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There’s a note I sent to Angi years ago that I still point to as a kind of genesis: “Imagine if we could inspire the same belief in ourselves that we inspire in others.” 

It took years from that moment to arrive at a new definition for our lives inside this profession of design and sense-making. 

If I’ve learned anything about time, it’s that it takes what it takes, and there is little you can do to compress the lessons you have to learn along the way.

The journey of a founder is at once predictably cliché and perfectly singular. Which is to say, human.

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The Currency is a design firm for brands founded in meaning. 

We describe our approach as embedded. We take seats inside businesses, collaborate across functions, and apply our expertise in messaging frameworks and design languages to make companies money. But I think it’s our orientation to the soul of our work that matters.

No brand is a machine. It is a living system that runs on the currencies of belief and desire.

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I could write for days about the people who have championed us when all I wanted was to fold into my relentless anxieties about “making it.”

There is no making it. No moment of arrival. No reliable map.

Strip away the pretenses of business, and what remains? A few units of human energy. Belief. Compulsion. A rage of desire. And the knowledge that with enough effort and focus, the right thing will happen at the right time to shift plausibility into action.

This is an action that I see modeled by the founders and leaders we’re fortunate enough to know. The ones who teach me that genuine belief in what you’re doing and why must be as unreasonable as it is elemental. 

Big or small, every brand of consequence is powered by the beautiful delusions of the people who insist on its right to exist.