The Character. Cédo

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Hi, I’m Katherine – CEO and Creative Director of Cédo. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the “before” with a kind of professional tenderness. The years inside agencies, the pace, the discipline, the way your taste is shaped by pressure and repetition. I think my partners would agree – they carry a similar memory of those years, too. All of us came through major international agencies and film production, and at some point we made a similar decision – to build an agency where the process would belong to us.

Cédo became international the way many modern teams do – through circumstance, an obsession with craft, and a lot of hours nobody posts about. The more interesting shift came after. A team formed across countries, cities, and time zones. Different creative educations. Different cultural instincts. Over time, this stopped being a logistical detail and became a working language.

You can feel it in the way people move through work. Some colleagues respond with a metropolitan reflex – fast alignment, quick iterations, immediate decisions that keep the energy high. Others protect time, think longer, and build the answer with more precision. Everything still lands on schedule. The difference is in the rhythm of thinking – and rhythm changes what an idea becomes.

Somewhere along the way, Cédo started to feel like a character. I don’t mean a brand personality designed for the outside. I mean an internal presence you can sense in the work. Cédo is observant, restless, aesthetically demanding, and highly sensitive to context. It cares about the emotional temperature of an image. I feel like we’ve been treating taste as a discipline for a while now.

Just picture one of our creative chats shared across all branches. A senior designer texts: I’m stuck. I want to make something really cool, but when I look at the market, everything feels the same for this type of promotion. And there’s a very specific cultural code here, because this is how the market is behaving right now. Then an art director from our HQ in New York replies: take a look at this creative we developed for a client here – maybe it will give you a direction, or maybe it will spark something.

The number of additions, ideas, and new angles that appear in this everyday rhythm still surprises me. That, to me, is one of the most beautiful things about Cédo. It really has become a character – deeply curious, exactly as we once wrote in the agency slogan: Stay curious. Stay creative. I never thought that slogan would become such a real reflection of our daily process.

It is genuinely inspiring to watch how our projects become stronger through depth and uniqueness, simply because our managers’ and creatives’ thinking never stays confined to a single market. There is real curiosity there – a willingness to research, to immerse themselves in history and culture, to keep looking further. And at the same time, there is never a refusal of another point of view.

And maybe this is one of the most important things for a leader – to stay open to being inspired by your own team, to notice the details, and to guide their direction with respect for their cultural instincts and differences. I find a real sense of joy in watching the way they support one another, the way they think out loud, the way they argue, question, and refine ideas together. In the way they work, they have become true cosmopolitans. And that kind of depth, openness, and exchange is something truly valuable.

With creative love,

Katherine