#codo design

Prodigy Brewing in China

Today marks CODO’s sixth anniversary. Six years. That’s almost one in dog years. In business years, well, just six.

That’s six years of building this company—working with people, organizations, and initiatives we believe in across Indiana, and increasingly, the United States. Six years of working hard, learning as we go, rolling with punches, and always evolving the company, refining processes, and including our clients in the creative process.

Over the last year, CODO members have purchased homes, retired old college cars (with the requisite viking funerals), invested in client companies, gotten engaged, and volunteered time and services around Indianapolis.

We were lucky to travel around the country to beautiful places like Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Virginia. On deck are “working” trips to Alaska, Arizona, New Jersey, Illinois, and if we play our cards right, Mexico. I feel like I say this every other week, but if you were to go back to when we were in school six years ago, back to when CODO was still a dream, and tell me I might get the opportunity to visit a beautiful place, or even fly to another country for work, I would’ve laughed you out of the classroom.

This last year, we won awards, published a magazine, gave big time (and small time) presentations, authored dozens of widely shared thoughts on design (particularly surrounding craft beer), and some of us were even able to take real life vacations. And what started out as a slow trickle has morphed into a scary amount of work within the craft beer industry, with us just inking a deal with our tenth brewery partner.

Rather than continue to list every exciting thing that happened to us this year, I’ll talk for a minute about what’s to come for CODO. Over the next year, we’ll be hiring some new folks. We’ll be publishing a Craft Beer Branding Guide that’ll help startup breweries through every step of the branding process. We’ll begin working on our new website and along the way, take a long overdue look at our own branding and positioning. And while this task will never end, the next few years will be a process of determining what we want CODO to be in the not too distant future.

Do we want to continue being a small, nimble company? Valuing the level of craft, and including our clients in the creative process above all else?

Or do we want to become a medium-sized company? Six to ten employees. An actual HR policy, etc.

Or do we want to grow into a big company? Maybe Cody and I could wear business guy suits all day and monitor our stocks AND bonds while others do our bidding? (I have no idea what successful people do with their time. Hunt people for sport?)

Today marks CODO’s 5th anniversary, and that’s a nice round number. Five years ago, when Cody and I graduated from Herron and founded this business, people told us that our first anniversary would be a momentous occasion because, “Only 1 out of X businesses survive their first year.” Then, we heard it was actually 2 years. And then 3 years, and then 5 and 7 and 10. The goalposts will probably never stop moving, but I feel like this anniversary is a pretty big deal.

The biggest thing this number represents is that internally, I feel like we’ve matured into whatever it is that comes after the start up phase—a teen business? Tween business?? That’s it folks, CODO has matured into a beautiful tween branding and web design firm. You’re probably wondering what that means. So am I, and I apologize. 

Anyway, 5 years is a big deal for us, and rather than go on and on with weird, poorly constructed metaphors about success and maturity, I’ll just give you a run down of some of this year’s highlights. 

The biggest thing we’ve done this year is hire Ryan Herrmann. Aside from being one of the funniest people we’ve ever met, he’s an incredible talent and is already fast on his way to becoming one of the area’s best designers. 

Around this time last year, we survived a significant office robbery. Don’t worry, we recovered. And thrived, even. 

After a two month marketing campaign, we launched Indianapolis’ most popular new food truck.

After designing and launching dozens of client websites, we finally managed to launch CODO’s new responsive site. It’s not even six months old and we’re already toying with the idea of redesigning it altogether. We’re our own worst clients. 

We won a Gold ADDY for our package design work on Bone Snapper Rye Whiskey. Now, we can join the thousands of design firms across the country that tout being “award-winning.” Ahhhh, victory! 

We’ve been taking a new Nora brewpub, Big Lug Canteen, through our Hands-on Branding process since early summer. In addition to being fun to hang out with, these guys have hired us to name their brewery, design tap handles, beer labels, a responsive website and all the related ephemera you can think of. We feel this way with nearly every project, but Big Lug is shaping up to be some of the best work of our careers.  

Our early package design work for Sitka Salmon Shares earned our team a trip to Alaska and since then, our branding, fully-custom e-commerce responsive website, marketing and print design have received an absurd amount of national, earned media (both for CODO and Sitka Salmon Shares) across many lifestyle publications, industry-defining design blogs, as well as a prominent feature in Entrepreneur Magazine.

Additional highlights include branding Indianapolis’ newest Cultural District, Market East, as well as launching Ex. Ex., Midwest, a magazine examining midwestern food culture.

On the digital front, CODO continued designing beautiful, robust responsive websites and this year saw the launch of several gorgeous ones for clients including: Daredevil Brewing Co, Sitka Salmon Shares, the Indy Food Council, Fresh Bucks Indy and Tree House Yoga.

We’ve seen a big spike in paid speaking engagements across the country, including traveling to Wisconsin to present to the Stephens Point AIGA chapter as well as host an all-day workshop on our Hands-on Branding process. This thought leadership has also translated into writing on branding and positioning for the craft beer industry blog, Craft Brewing Business.

And perhaps the most exciting thing as we head into our 6th year is that we essentially blinked and ended up working with 6 craft breweries—5 from Indiana and a brand new, yet-to-be-named production brewery in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. 

We went through some heavy stuff earlier this summer and our friends at Metonymy Media let us write about it on their blog.

We recently ventured to Sitka, Alaska as part of a five day exploratory trip to learn the town, its people and its culture as part of rebranding Sitka Salmon Shares. 

Aside from eating some of the most amazing meals of our lives, we were able to spend several days hiking up mountains, fishing the Pacific Ocean, foraging for wild mushrooms and drinking with the locals.