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Farewell 2020, A Year Like No Other

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December 21, 2020 5 min read
by Karsten Cramer

We’re almost there – just a few more emails to go and we can say farewell to 2020, at least from a work perspective.

Yet just before we sign off for the year, we want to share this update with you about a year like no other at Hyphen.

4 reasons to cheer

Optimism, hope, silver linings – however you want to label it, we see great value in celebrating the good around us, even (or especially) during challenging times. Here are 4 big reasons we had to cheer in 2020.

  1. A commitment to donating 1% of our sales

We’re incredibly excited to have signed on with 1% for the Planet. Start small, start big, start somewhere. We’ve pledged to donate 1% of our overall annual sales to causes that benefit our environment, and we couldn’t be happier about it!

  1. 22 five-star Google Reviews

It’s one thing to feel we’ve done a good job; it’s quite another to hear this directly from our clients. Our hard work and creativity are always aimed at generating meaningful results for clients, so hearing that we’ve hit the target is hugely rewarding.

Want to share your experience with Hyphen? We’d love it if you’d write a review 😉

  1. 8 awards won in 2020

We don’t do the work we do to win awards, but we’re not above celebrating when we win them. In 2020, we had 8 good reasons for a toast, including 2 Hermes Creative Awards (1 Platinum, 1 Gold) and 6 Davey Awards (2 Gold, 4 Silver).

Curious what our award-winning work looks like? Check out the Overlap and International Schools Global websites, or have a look through our Ramsden case study.

  1. New website!

Our clients weren’t the only ones to launch new websites in 2020. After 2 years in development (sorry, we were busy helping others!), we were overjoyed to launch a new Hyphen website this year.

We think it’s bold and fun and different. In other words, we think it’s pure Hyphen. We’d love to know what you think!

Take care of each other, always

The Hyphen team is small yet mighty, and our commitment to taking care of each other is a value that sits at our very core. Although COVID was a challenge, it simply made us stronger. It pushed us to stick together, to support one another, and to be honest and open with what we’re going through.

From the start, our aim was to ensure that our team was confident that no one had to fear for their roles. In our business, our team is the most valuable ‘asset’.

This made it that much harder when circumstances unrelated to the pandemic meant we had to say farewell to Ding Yuhui, a long-standing team member. We miss you, Ding, and wish you all the best!

How are you guys doing?

This was probably the question we heard most often in 2020. And when it comes to answering, we like to keep it real.

Like many creative companies, we saw net-new business at the start of lockdown grind to a halt, and overall for the year our total revenue fell just 8% year on year.

Not what we’d hoped for 2020, yet in a year when so many businesses have been forced to close shop, we feel immensely grateful to our existing clients and our team for what we’ve managed to achieve this year as a small, 4-year-old creative business.

The other top question of 2020

Are you keeping your office space? Absolutely! We can’t live without it!

Random facts for a random year

There’s nothing like some random trivia to close out the year, so without further ado, we’d like to end with some 2020 Hyphen Fun Facts:

  • Hyphen went into WFH mode on March 12, 2020 (at which point Nat was already on her second vacation of the year!). Sadly, no one else on our team got to travel this year, but we did all take time off for #staycations.
  • 85 custom, handwritten birthday cards sent! We launched this initiative in 2020 as we realized we could all use an extra touch of joy in our lives.
  • Our favourite way to spread holiday cheer is with a local touch. For the 2020 holiday season, we adopted a local approach to gift giving for our clients and friends, sourcing  boxes of the most delicious buttery shortbread from Toronto bakery XO Bisous and holiday gift boxes with sustainable, Canadian-made products from My Weekend is Booked, a mother/daughter business based in SW Ontario.
  • New family member: 1 new puppy! Tamar, our marketing operations superstar, welcomed a tiny King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, who is still chewing on name options. We believe he’ll be a perfect little friend to Winston, our English Springer Spaniel grumpy guard dog.

What a year!

From all of us at Hyphen, we wish you the happiest of holidays. Tell your loved ones you love them (in person or online – whatever is safest), indulge your senses (cookies, eggnog and roaring fireplaces), and recharge your body and mind (naps!).

2021 is just around the corner, and we’re pretty sure that it, too, will be a year like no other!

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