Now that you've read our overly dramatic, clickbait headline, please let us clarify...
We have made the decision to consolidate both of our agency brands under the Craft&Crew umbrella. In fact, we went a step further and have changed our corporate name from Soshal Group Inc. to Craft&Crew Corp., and we will be retiring the Soshal brand altogether. Why are we doing this?
This past September, we celebrated our 10th year in business; a decade dedicated to discovery. From our humble beginnings as a social media consulting firm (hence the name Soshal to begin with), charging $850 / month to manage the Twitter and Facebook accounts of local, small businesses in Ottawa, to where we are now has been quite a journey and much has changed along the way. Most notably, we haven't positioned ourselves as "those social media guys" in a very long time.
Last January, when we launched "Craft&Crew", our intention was to operate both agencies independently, with dedicated teams and service offerings under each brand. Soshal would continue to operate as our full-service marketing agency while Craft&Crew would focus on digital experience design. But then, 2020 happened.
For us, we were fortunate to experience very minimal interruptions to our business compared to many others out there but the pandemic did give us an opportunity to pause, reflect, and simplify. We took a hard look in the mirror and asked "What are we truly passionate about?", "Where do we generate the majority of our profits?", and "What processes and people do we have in place that are the most scalable and sustainable?".
The answer was obvious; over the last ten years we have produced and managed some of the largest, most trafficked websites in the world in partnership with really exciting brands. We have defined processes for doing so that ensure we are profitable 100% of the time, and most importantly, we have a team of people that are truly experts in this field of production.
You could say closing Soshal is a casualty of the pandemic, another mark against 2020. But, we feel much differently; it is a sign of maturity and of growth. Pick up any book on entrepreneurship or how to manage a business and the first chapter is likely on "Focus", a lesson we often like to gloss over. In 2020, we calmed the chaos with clarity.
And so, without using too many puns, Craft&Crew is the vessel for the next phase in our voyage. The name emphasizes two things that, no matter how we shift and evolve over time, will remain constant: our commitments to 1) our Craft, and 2) to the employees, clients, and partners we work with...our Crew.
Thank you for following us over the last decade. Now, let's set sail into the future!
Dave, Phil, and Chad