People were pretty into it. We got 308 responses. Each response was transcribed, and Yi-Fan and Alex spent a week drawing portraits. Then came the weekend.  We were here for 29 out of 48 hours. Drawing, typing, vectorizing, printing, cutting, taping. Then on Monday morning, this happened.

We ended up circling back to one of the ideas we thought was stupid. Andrew said he loved it, Jim said he loved it, Byron was totally cool with it. We would ask everyone in the Portland office to tell us a story about when they were 12. We thought about a title for about a week then settled on “When You Were 12.”

Then all we had to do was figure out the execution. More stupid ideas. After a while, Yi-Fan drew a simple picture of a 12 year old, and everything fell into place.

Each of us would go up to 45 WKers and hand them a card. Each 12er’s card featured their simple portrait and a story. The back was left blank for the recipient’s story. It was perfect, now we just needed people to be into it.

Our first brief was terrifying. Introduce ourselves to the company while introducing the company to itself. Wieden+Kennedy had hired fifty people in the last month and none of them were being properly introduced to the agency. We automatically came up with 1 billion stupid ideas.  Eventually we focused on one we really liked. It involves pies.  We didn’t end up using that Idea, but we won’t tell you about it now because it will be used at a later date.