The 2020s are clearly destined to be a decade of great change.

For Wordsmithie and the rest of the world, the pandemic that began early last year threw everything we thought we knew about health, business, and life in general into chaos. We’ve always been a distributed business with team members located all over the world, and that allowed us to pivot quickly and fairly seamlessly into the new world of remote work and Zoom calls. And while we all hoped that the stressors of 2020 fall by the wayside with a new year, 2021 felt like an extension of 2020.

On a personal level, 2021 has not been an easy year for many of us at Wordsmithie. We’ve lost family members, loved ones, pets. We’ve felt the strain that working from home and the stress of the pandemic have put on our relationships and our WiFi bandwidth. We’ve fought illness and disease, recovered, and fought again.

And yet. And yet, in the midst of all that difficulty: beauty and joy. This December, as we close the year, we’re sending a virtual toast to one of our writers to celebrate her wedding, and virtual nappies to one of our studio directors upon the arrival of his third child. In fact, we’re having a bit of a baby boom – yours truly is also expecting a baby (my first!) in early 2022. (We’ve also welcomed numerous wonderful new clients and three fabulous new studio directors to the Wordsmithie team, and we’ve added more than a dozen talented new writers and editors, each with unique skills and backgrounds. In 2021, we also welcomed our new Chief Operating Officer, Chuck Mancini, and have continued our fruitful partnership with our executive coach, Emily Neustadt. In 2020, Wordsmithie celebrated our 10th anniversary, and as we head into our 12th year, we’re deeply grateful to our clients and partners who trust us to help them tell their stories. We’re also grateful for the individual members of our team, whose personalities and passions make us more than the sum of our parts — and we’re celebrating that this year in a few different ways:

• Our website. You’ll notice that our relaunched website now features photos and stories of our entire Wordsmithie team, as well as design cues, photography, and other elements from our own personal hometowns and hobbies.
• Our holiday gifting. We love celebrating what makes our team special; for our 10th anniversary last year, we sent our team members gifts created or inspired by each other.  This year we’re sending our team coffee roasted by our Chief Strategy Officer’s wife, and candles and soap made by one of our writers who’s also a beekeeper (!). Two different kinds of holiday buzz! We love this “by Wordsmithie, for Wordsmithie” tradition, and plan to keep it going for the next 10 years and beyond.

Google: Our special partnership

We’re extremely proud of our special relationship with Google, one that we’ve earned through years of trust and cooperation. As our largest client — and with many of us, including our founder, Laura, being former Googlers (aka Xooglers) — we’re privileged to work closely with teams across many Google different divisions In 2021, we helped create content for audiences as wide-ranging as Google executive leadership, small business owners, global educators, web influencers, healthcare providers, online advertisers, and U.S. policymakers. 

We scored highly on Google’s agency report card, receiving especially high marks from across our client teams in the “Relationship” category. That means a lot to us here at Wordsmithie because supporting the people we work with and watching those relationships flourish is at the heart of everything we do.

But of everything we helped Google make in 2021, we’re most proud of supporting All In, Google’s Inclusive Marketing initiative. Wordsmithie helped edit and proofread the site content, which educates, explains, and codifies inclusive language and marketing standards for Google and its agency partners d to “help our teams improve representation and belonging in our work.” 

More than just words

Beyond the work we do with Google and our other technology sector clients, Wordsmithie continues to support The Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights on a pro bono basis, donating our time and expertise to their social media campaigns, video scripts, campaign strategies, and other content needs. And next year we will be launching a very special project called HumansWrite, an online community and learning resource for social justice communicators.

Welcoming new brands to the Wordsmithie family

Expanding our family of clients was a priority for us as we seek to diversify our portfolio of industry disruptors, innovators, and game-changers. To that end, we were thrilled to welcome aboard Coinbase, Square, and TechSoup in 2021. We look forward to seeing these and all our partnerships flourish in 2022.

And we’re about to be certified! 

Since we are a woman-owned business (hi, Laura!), we’re wrapping up the process of becoming nationally certified as a Woman-Owned Business™ with the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council. In addition to demonstrating our commitment to creating opportunities for and magnifying the voices of women and people of diverse backgrounds, we look forward to the opportunities this certification will create for more clients to find us. 

Come meet us in Rockport!

When we were born distributed in 2010, we knew that remote work would change the world, And so it (finally) has… and now, we’re moving gently in the opposite direction, with this year’s acquisition and renovation of our first physical headquarters at the corner of Beach St. and Main St. in lovely downtown Rockport, Massachusetts (where our founder lives).   Located in the heart of a historic artists colony and across the street from the beach (and also the rumored site of buried pirate treasure), we look forward to using this captivating space as an office, a gathering place for our team and clients, and as a venue for events supporting the local literary community. r. Rockport has always been known as a haven for visual and performing artists; we’d like to help make it a hub for the literary arts, too. We’ll be opening the office in early 2022, and hope you’ll drop by to say “hi.”

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From all of us here at Wordsmithie, thank you to our friends and family, partners and clients, and everyone who enables us to do what we love: Helping great brands tell their stories in authentic, compelling ways.

2021 was one of ages; and now, here’s to a great 2022! Let’s make it the best year yet.