Yooo,

Welcome to December Jr., that weird limbo month between Halloween and Christmas where it’s too early to feel festive, the weather is cold AF, and everyone’s stressing about the end of the year… but at least it’s Rachel’s birthday month? (Yay)?

⭐️ What’s New

We don’t know what happened with last month, TBH. It’s all a blur:

We were supposed to send out our first newsletter on Oct.1st, but it was 1 day late cause we forgot about it until the night before (whoops)
Shortly after, Neo discovered what AI was REALLY capable of and went off the deep end with overhauling our entire system (which seriously stressed Rachel out)
We started optimizing some of our branding deliverables for AI-use and we’re mind-blown with the results (apparently design guidelines solve the “slop” problem)
Rachel discovered frozen, bake at home Costco croissants and was ✨obsessed✨ for the entire month (those who follow her on IG can verify)
We then thought it would be a great idea to overbook our schedules on the week of Thanksgiving (it wasn’t.)
Somehow made it to Thanksgiving (but sadly had no time for turkey this year)
Had our spare office chair claimed by Kira (our other cat), so now Neo just sits on a stool (RIP Neo’s back)
Rachel finally got her teeth cleaned after 2 years of dodging her dentist (please clap 👏)
Ended the month with our systems in utter chaos, but somehow we’re still functioning (just barely)

Amidst this shitstorm, we made a HUGE discovery that kinda sorta changes the way we work:

Neo has ADHD — he’s hella scattered, which is why he’s in charge of building our systems. If he can run it, it’s a good system.
Rachel (recently learned) that she has OCD — she has to have things done a certain way, which is why she’s great at making brands… but slow to adapt to changes.

Put together (especially on a crazy month like this), it kinda looks like:

Neo makes his 4236th change to our system
Rachel gets stressed cause it breaks her routine (again)
Neo (patiently) explains this change to Rachel
Rachel files this change to the 4236th open tab in her brain, which processes changes 1 tab at a time
Neo continues working on implementing changes at the speed of light
Rachel finishes a brand & asks Neo where she should save the files in our new system
Neo immediately abandons his current task to help Rachel
Neo forgets what he was working on before and starts a new task before finishing the previous one
We now have 4236 +1 changes to our system
Rachel get stressed again cause she has another new thing to keep track of
**The cycle continues**

Needless to say, we’ve learned a lot this month — about ourselves, what our business needs, where we genuinely suck, and where we need to get better. We hope that we finish this overhaul of our systems before December, or Rachel’s gonna lose her shit.

Please send good vibes our way. ✨

👀 FYI

We’ve cooked up a really cool tool that takes your current brand, and creates previews of what it COULD look like if we spiced it up a bit. “I don’t know until I see it” is now no longer a problem. The best part? This tool is trained on hours of Rachel’s voice notes across a bunch of different brands, and the results are pretty fucking dope: