By Karrisa Olsen
For our August portfolio event, we were looking to switch it up. While planning, we wondered, “where can we find cool clients, delicious coffee, intimidatingly stylish young people, and a view of the Manhattan skyline?” Oh right, Brooklyn. So off we went.
Within minutes of walking through the artsy DUMBO neighborhood, Alex and I discovered that this area is populated with a ton of cute and friendly dogs. If you haven’t visited our Instagram page, it’s typically filled with pictures of dogs in our office, so we were excited about this. Here’s a furry friend we made:
Our first meeting brought us to Generation, a branding agency for nonprofits. They do a lot of impressive work for institutions, so we brought along a handful of our education and lifestyle photographers. Jamie Wolfe, who manages their design and production, took the time to look through all that we brought and listened intently about how we could help her on projects in the future. Jamie was coincidentally already busy working with one of our photographers, but there were others she wasn’t already acquainted with who made an impression on her, like Porter Gifford and Terry Vine.
With a small amount of free time between meetings, Alex and I detoured to a park on the East River, where we sat between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridge for a short-lived, but relaxing break.
Next up was Red Antler, whose clients vary between start-ups and tech companies (they just rebranded Foursquare). An enthusiastic bunch, their creative team thoroughly enjoyed looking through physical books. The lifestyle work of Natalie Faye made an impression for an upcoming project, while the automotive work and moody landscapes in Roy Ritchie’s portfolio were marveled at by many. The highlight, though, was definitely when they came across images of their own offices in Ryan Donnell’s book. No co-workers have been spotted during a portfolio meeting before, so this was a fun first. We informed them of all of the logistics of Wonderful Machine and left feeling accomplished.
Our last meeting of the day was another one-on-one, this time with the lovely Jessie Adler of Hemispheres Magazine. Jessie is already an avid user of Wonderful Machine and our stock services. She had in fact already worked with both Julian Love and Yadid Levy in the past, who we brought along for her to see. Still, this didn’t keep her from spending time with them. We introduced her to the beautiful work of Raleigh-based Joel Collins and a hospitality extraordinaire, Devon Stephens. I had expected her to already know of Matt Dutile, a local in Queens, but was happy to hear that she hadn’t. We shared our love for travel as we flipped through his stunning images of Thailand and Greece. Our meeting was a great refresh for Jessie and it was a pleasure chatting with her.
Speaking of travel, we headed over Radegast Hall in Williamsburg (the only place in the US to get an unfiltered Radeberger) for happy hour. Shavonne Wong, one of our photographers based in Singapore, is in New York for the summer and joined us. It’s very rare that we get the opportunity to meet our international members, so this was a pleasure! We were also joined by Jordan Hollender and his wife Diane, who made us laugh over wooden boards of oversized, doughy German pretzels. After taking epic selfies, we headed back toward Philly–but not without catching the skyline at dusk on the way.
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