We turned 10 and we couldn’t shut up about it.

A reflective podcast. A new website. A team birthday trip.
Sending out gifts (the irony of sending gifts on your own birthday did come up).
A party with our well-wishers, past teammates, clients and favourite people.
Thank you messages. Or even maybe just a hearty post.

At some point, it started feeling like we wanted to do everything, everywhere, all at once.
Some of us wanted to celebrate properly, get everyone together, make some noise. A part of us wanted to slow down, reflect, and feel grateful for how far it had come. Every idea worked in its own way, but each came with tradeoffs. The discussion around our tenth birthday crept into our other everyday conversations, showed up between unrelated thoughts, and kept moving from one place to another.

We kept the video close to how those discussions actually sounded. Abrupt, overlapping, constantly cutting across each other. More like a room full of voices than a neatly wrapped message.

Here’s what we ended up making.

There was so much to be said, so much to cover, and the video had to hold a lot of volume. Ten years brought work, memories, opinions, pride, jokes, side conversations, and half finished thoughts, all arriving at once. The reflective checklist came in as another voice in the room. Work across industries. Campaigns. Awards. Attempts at consistency. Things that stuck. Things that changed along the way. Everything asked for attention at the same moment. Looking back, the decade came to us layered, overlapping, and slightly unruly.
Which somehow felt right. Surreal even.

The making of the video followed that same, iterative path. We moved through neon light bar mouths, cleaner vector ideas, refined 3D forms, and eventually landed on something raw-er, more hands on. Almost crayon-like. It felt closer to how our initial discussions actually sounded. This was also the first time we worked with proper viseme sheets, mapping mouth shapes to sound and spending more time with lips than we're used to, ha!

Over ten years, we've built so many brands, systems, identities, and stories. The one thing we kept revisiting was our own jar shape. Every few years, sometimes sooner, we redesigned it, adjusting form, detail, and intent as the studio evolved. We had been working on our jar shape for a while before the tenth. Testing it, refining it, seeing how it behaved across different contexts. One version kept doing its job consistently, and we knew this was it.

We called it Jaro.
This was a key announcement in the video.
We’ll share the full, super-exciting, in-depth story of Jaro, in a separate Playground post.