Hey Wonderland, how have you evolved through 2022?

We’ve shifted focus and realigned our mission and vision, deprioritising creativity for creativity's sake in favour of work with impact. We’ve further internationalised our team and now have people from fourteen different nations. And, through it all, we’ve delivered work we’re exceedingly proud of, for clients that have been a pleasure to partner and create with.

So, as we work through the final quarter of the twenty-second year of the third millennium - to make a deliberate fuss about it - we wanted to have a quick review of our 2022 evolution, and bring you along for the journey.

When we started the year, we had a fully stacked in-house development team (see what we did there 😉), and focused on brand design and refurbishment, and UX/UI design. At our core, we were a pure-play creative studio that specialised in creating digital experiences that promised a ‘wow’ factor for users and results for our partners, and we loved doing it. We redefined music journalism with Wax Poetics, created a unique brand expression with Source.ag, and worked with Nike to keep parents and children fit and active through lockdowns with Nike Train & Play.

However, early in 2022, we realised it was time for a change. We saw a drastically reduced need for an in-house development team balanced by increasing client demands for branding and design. As the world shifts and turns, we realised that flexibility is key, so we adjusted our structure and shifted development to carefully chosen external partners and studios.

Along with shifting focus to our core strengths - strategy, brand, and design - we also reviewed the clients we work with, prioritising those that are working to make the world a better place and leverage positive change, rather than those focused on profits and empty promises. Through the year, we realised this vision with numerous clients, from Welt Ventures and their mission of democratising venture capital investments for the mass market, to a soon-to-launch UK-based organic spirits company with an entirely green process. And, of course, we launched our Sustainable Digital Design platform.

In parallel, we began the process of becoming a B Corp, and will be submitting our application in the coming weeks. Through the process, we reimagined our culture, evolving on our people-first approach that centres on the advancement and evolution of our teams, and ensuring that they get to where they want to go, rather than a singular focus on where Wonderland needs them to be.

With this, we bought in health-care contributions and a profit-sharing scheme, a revised salary house and training budgets, client-free Fridays, and a new office in the heart of Amsterdam. In short, we transformed Wonderland and how we work to achieve our goal of making Wonderland, and Wonderlanders, better, and prioritising people and planet above all else.

Without a doubt, 2022 has been our most unique year yet. Where the shift to working remotely and the daily ‘WFH’ status updates of 2020 and 2021 were easy to track, this has been a more disruptive change. Aside from growing different teams in the company - namely our branding and strategy teams - we’ve also had to review how we want to operate in the coming years, and in the face of a potential recession. We’ve spent time and energy on creating a stronger culture for new team members as they come in, and helping foster emerging creatives through our traineeship program. And, most importantly, we feel better for it.

While 2022 has been one of enormous change, the finished product is a faster, leaner, more ambitious Wonderland.