Look, we’re a humble marketing agency with simple dreams. And from the company’s beginning more than a decade ago, one of those dreams has always been to have our own in-house developer team.
But you know how it is with agencies. We’re a service business, which means we don’t always have much control of our “product roadmap.” Agencies like ours need to run lean and scrappy, and we can only invest in new skills and teams when our clients signal an appetite to pay for them.
At the same time, we think of ourselves as the world’s foremost agency for producing great digital content. We have the marketing world’s best editorial team of writers, bloggers, and editors (that’s not puffery, that’s actually true). We have incredible designers, animators, and illustrators. We have great UX designers. We recently added a video director from the tech media, so we can do large- and small-scale video production in-house.
But we didn’t have an in-house developer team. Which means we could create content for a brand’s website or landing page or immersive digital experience. But we had to tap outside resources to create the website or landing page or immersive digital experience itself.
Back in October, I had my regular 1:1 with our lead UX designer, Justine. She basically said “It’s time. We have a full digital production stack, and we have plenty of client demand. We’re just missing the front-end dev skills to build it all.”
So we went out and found Andrew Lux, and we couldn’t be more excited. Our first in-house developer is an experienced front-end dev who specializes in content and CMS work, a natural fit for us. Andrew’s spent time at some of our favorite tech companies, worked with some killer teams, really knows his shit, and has the same friendly vibe that we love about our team. We really Luxed out.
Our first project together was a complete rebuild and redesign of our own website, the perfect test of our complete digital production and marketing stack. We’ve just wrapped up a brand refresh, new positioning, new visual ID, and under Andrew’s leadership, poured it all into a website that encapsulates our culture, our expertise, and our fresh new dev chops. It’s an end-to-end brand refresh that we were able to complete entirely in-house in a matter of weeks.
We hope you’ll check it out, share it with your friends, and say hi to the updated Codeword and our new developer lead.
