The Your Majesty Highlights of 2020
What. A. Year…
I think we can all agree that 2020 could have been a way better year than it played out to be. It was supposed to be record-breaking good, but it turned out completely different in so many ways.
However, to list all the world’s crazy 2020 happenings would take me my entire holiday break, which I prefer spending resting. Plus, since I’m sure over 9000 such posts are being written as I’m typing this, I’ll focus on what’s been going on in the knighthood we call Your Majesty.
As Covid hit Europe, several of our clients and the sectors we serve got struck hard. Fashion, Travel & Hospitality, and Sports were some of the first to be totally frozen and led to many canceled projects and frozen budgets for us.
It was rough.
In the wake of the roughness and its effects on the company’s financials, mental wellbeing, and culture, we had to say farewell to a group of loyal, hardworking, talented, and wonderfully kind members of our knighthood. Personally, it was one of the most challenging times in my career, as it also meant having to bid farewell to people that I dearly wanted to work with for many more years.
On the bright side, I’ve seen every person who has left Your Majesty this year move up with new significant steps in their careers. Seeing their success makes the roughness a bit more bearable to endure.
In the second half of the year, things turned for the better, and we got back to being busy with great work.
Now, we are hiring again, and I’m confident that 2021 will be great.
Enough of that, on to the highlights!
When we had our remote holiday jubilee dinner the other week, we decided to look back at the highlights of this flaming turd of a year. To our delight, it turned out to be quite a lot of them, both client-related, internal projects, and events.
For our client work It has been an active year — and we’ve continued to serve some of the world’s most respected brands and challenger startups in Tech, Sports, Travel & Hospitality, Food & Beverage, Automotive & Mobility, Fashion & Apparel, and more. For that privilege, I’m deeply grateful.
In recent years, an increasing amount of work are things we’re not allowed to talk about for legal reasons. So in the list below, I’m deliberately not mentioning specifics, and you simply have to live with that. 😊
2. We prolonged our tenure as a roster agency for a leading video streaming platform.
3. We celebrated the 200th issue of our newsletter, 10 Things, with a giant virtual cake — check it out here. (Don’t forget to subscribe!)
4. We branded and helped launch Raise Green to help accelerates the US on its path towards more solar-powered communities.
5. Our talented knights answered WHO’s call to combat misinformation as COVID spread by creating the quiz-game #StopTheSpreadWithFacts.
6. We helped a leading social network educate and onboard millions of new users to their work-collaboration product.
7. We helped our friends at The Fabricant launch LEELA, the world’s first platform for digital self-expression, and I got to turn myself into a digital avatar and sport sassy virtual clothes.
8. In the process of 7, we dug way deeper into the exciting new world of digital fashion and its powerful applications that can redeem the Fashion industry in the years to come.
Read all about it here:
9. We helped the Peaceful Heart Network with a more effective growth strategy.
10. We did some pretty out-there experiential auto show concepts for my boyhood’s favorite supercar brand.
11. We shared our learnings and best tips and tricks for coping with lockdown and how to make clients work effectively from afar.
You can read up here:
- How Your Majesty is staying together while working apart
- Your Majesty shares our best tips on working better with clients when remote
- How Your Majesty runs remote strategy sessions with clients
- To mend the world after COVID-19, we need a different approach to innovation.
12. We worked with the team at V&A Museum in Dundee to keep funds coming in during lockdown by redesigning their purchase flows with a focus on donations.
13. We stuck to our traditions and celebrated Swedish midsummer on our balcony’s via Zoom.
14. We worked with The Oslo Company to deliver a phygital launch campaign for a large Norwegian Salmon Exporter’s entrance into the Chinese market.
15. We helped a UK textile pattern designer create a social distance proof way to experience fabrics online.
16. We continued helping Dopper on their mission to rid the world of single-use plastic.
17. It was a weird year for the NBA, but our team and client took home the Championship. I can now finally say there’s a correlation between the amount of Your Majesty you work with and your NBA championship performance. Jokes aside, a big congratulations to the Los Angeles Lakers team, and I wish you a smashing start to the 20/21 season!
18. We migrated NewMotion’s entire architecture to Storyblok and made the site 120% faster in the process.
19. We consulted renowned architects Space & Matter on their new exciting venture.
20. Hugo experimented with new ways to interact online by creating Voiceroom: A More Social Alternative to Zoom.
21. We helped one of the biggest hospitality brands in the world bring a global message of remote togetherness during this holiday season.
22. Anna hosted a remote Swedish kanel bulle course via Zoom, both delicious and educational.
23. Hugo also saved December by making his annual lottery WebGL experiment for our wine lottery Advent Calendar. The 2020 edition was a Dog race, but with humans instead of dogs. See the video here.
24. We had several remote lunches & learns with the team on topics such as how to price creative work, doing SEO right, why we really dig StoryBlok, how to cope with lockdown, and much more.
Wrapping it up
2020 was indeed a weird year, and humans tend to remember the bad stuff and belittle the good. Nevertheless, I’m grateful and happy to see that it also was filled with extraordinary, fun, and inspirational things and excellent work with excellent people.
Looking ahead
I’m excited for 2021. With all the learnings we picked up this year, we’re ready to tackle whatever challenges come next.
A few BIG thank you’s…
- To Your Majesty alumni, for the time we had together and for being so incredibly generous with your smarts, hard work, and good vibes. Good luck, and I look forward to seeing your successes on my LinkedIn feed.
- To our clients, new and longtime, for keeping us on our feet, being candid with your feedback, taking the risk on our ideas, and for having our back through the rough times. We look forward to doing business and exceptional work with you in 2021 and beyond. *To our mentors and advisors for telling us when we’re making stupid decisions and keeping us focused on the right things.
- To our friends and life-partners, for being patient with us, for listening, for taking our minds off work, and for all those other million things we don’t thank you for enough.
- And, of course, to our current knights and dames of Your Majesty. You have been stunning colleagues and friends, and I couldn’t have done it without you.
Happy Holidays and Happier New Year
/G