Getting bold with cold outreach

The truth is, the vast majority of our collaborations are born from our own network. We aren’t special; word-of-mouth biz dev reigns supreme in most corners of the world. Our friends and ex-colleagues, without fail, pop into our work lives with project opportunities every single year. They aren’t just being generous, as we make a point to arm them with updates about new capabilities and to remind them that we’re out here. Those relationships require a special type of maintenance, which we gladly and instinctively perform.

And yet, there are brands and people out there who are aspirational for us, who exist on the other side of a giant chasm of our anonymity. A cold email to these companies is tossing a pebble into the ocean: it barely registers a ripple. But that doesn’t mean we don’t try. Each year deserves a handful of pebbles tossed like this, to let the giants know they’re on our radar. Typically, we’ll put a little bit of extra mustard on this sort of outreach… maybe it’s a snappy little edit of something we captured in studio, on our own time & our own dime. Whether or not they holler back from the great divide matters less than the fact that we did something. We learned something. We expressed something creative.

In this case, @Patagonia ‘liked’ our little piece on Twitter. We’re not in it for the likes, but for the opportunities. Next time we’ll choose a bigger pebble. 😉