30 Years of Wert&Co.
In 1995, the world was a different place.
Google didn’t exist. Amazon was still a bookstore. Our calls were made on landlines, our files lived on floppy disks. Design lived mostly on the edges: housed in studios, consulted on late, and rarely invited to the executive table.
Our office held a wall of mailed resumes, a room of physical portfolios, and stacks of 4×6 notecards—each one neatly labeled and bound with rubber bands—organizing the work that passed through our hands.
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Wert&Co. started quietly, with a few guiding beliefs:
That design was integral to business success
(and would move from the margins to the center).
That converging disciplines would find their place.
That leadership would require more than talent
—it would require vision, timing, care.
And that recruiting, when done right,
wasn’t transactional, but transformational.
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We may not have predicted everything. But we sensed what was coming.
Over the next three decades, we listened as design evolved: from service to strategy, from department to discipline. We watched our design community transform companies from the inside out—shaping not only products and services, but the ways people live, work, and connect.
We’ve navigated cycles: dot-com booms and busts, global market resets, the rise of mobile, the birth of social, and now the age of AI. We’ve seen the conversation shift from “Do we need design?” to “How can we lead with it?”
We built this company slowly and deliberately. We stayed small so we could go deep. We’ve spent years building relationships because what matters most are people. We’ve helped teams find their first design leader—and then their twentieth. We’ve tracked the careers of people we met as interns and supported them as they became VPs, investors, board members and founders.
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Today, our conversations are as much about values and purpose as they are about roles and requirements. About how we work, how we lead, how we build trust, and what it means to create with purpose in a world that’s moving fast.
Looking forward, we’ll keep asking better questions.
We’ll keep broadening what design leadership can mean and how far it can reach.
We’ll keep communicating with care, building with intention, and showing up with the kind of honesty that earns trust over time.
We’ll continue doing the work we’ve always done, while holding space for what comes next.
Because thirty years in, we know this much:
Design never stops moving.
Neither do we.
