On 1 April 2011, two people who had spent just over a decade publishing magazines for a living launched a digital marketing agency. No investors. No business plan worth the paper it wasn’t printed on. Just a ridiculous name, a shared belief that great content could sell anything and a stubbornness that, looking back, was probably our single greatest asset.

Fifteen years later, we’re still here. Still standing. Still arguing about headlines. Still unreasonably passionate about kerning.

We should probably talk about the name. People always ask. The short version: A legendary breakfast at Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. Poached eggs on twisted toast. A joking comment that if we ever started our own thing, we should call it that. The other two names we submitted for registration were forgettable corporate nonsense. Thank heavens the quirky one won.

The longer version is that the name turned out to mean something. Toast is universal. Everyone knows it. Everyone has it. Add a twist and you have something unexpected. Something that makes the ordinary worth noticing. That’s been our operating principle for 15 years, even when we didn’t know it yet!

What do you learn in 15 years of running a boutique agency in South Africa?

You learn that load shedding kills deadlines but not determination. Clients who trust you are worth more than clients who pay the most. That “we need it yesterday” is not a deadline; it’s a lifestyle. That the best brief is often the one the client didn’t know they needed to write. That a small team of people who care will outperform a large team of people who don’t, every single time.

You learn that trends are unreliable friends. We’ve watched Google+ come and go. Clubhouse, the metaverse come… and go. We’ve watched Vine come and go (a pity, we reckon, as it pioneered short-form mobile video in six-second loops in 2013, after all). NFTs arrive like rock stars and disappear like one-hit wonders. QR codes die and resurrect. Print declared dead so many times it should qualify for a miracle at Lourdes. We’ve seen social media evolve from “why should we be on Facebook?” to entire ecosystems of content, commerce and community management.

Through all of it, one thing has stayed constant. The work that lasts is the work that tells a true story well.

We came from magazines. MagFocus, FHM. heat. ZOO Weekly/Weekliks. And today, we still proudly design and publish the now digital-only, award-winning Poultry Bulletin magazine. The media world taught us many invaluable things, including that every page must earn its place. Every headline competes with the reader’s thumb. Every piece of content exists in a marketplace of attention where the price of boring is invisibility.

That discipline is printed into everything we do. When we build a website, we think like editors. When we write a social post, we think like creative feature writers. When we develop a brand strategy, we think like publishers who know that the cover sells the magazine, but the content keeps the subscriber.

Magazine people see the world differently. We can’t help it. It’s a gift. And occasionally a curse when you’re proofreading a restaurant menu and silently marking typos with a red pen you keep in your pocket for exactly this purpose. (That would be Louis.)

The agency world has changed radically since 2011. When we started, responsive web design was a novelty. Instagram was a year old. TikTok was a sound a clock made. AI was something from films. Google Ads was called Google AdWords and nobody had heard the phrase “content marketing”. They just called it what it was. Great writing and imagery that sells things.

Today, we build apps, develop SaaS platforms, run AI-powered search optimisation strategies and create content across many channels. Our toolkit has expanded beyond anything we could have imagined. But the core hasn’t shifted. We still believe that strategy without creativity is a spreadsheet and creativity without strategy is art hanging in the wrong room.

If there’s one thing that defines Twisted Toast, it’s our clients. Not in the sycophantic “our clients are amazing” sense that every agency trots out. In the honest sense that the relationships we’ve built are the reason we’re still in the game.

Some clients have been with us for many years. They’ve become friends. We know their children. We’ve celebrated their wins and helped them through difficult patches. We’ve had hard conversations, you know, the ones where we say “that’s not going to work” or “you need to spend more” or “actually, you need to spend less, just spend it better.” Those conversations require trust. Trust takes time. Time is what 15 years gives you.

To every client who has trusted us with their brand. Thank you. Not the polite, contractual thank you. The real one. The buttered one. With honey.

We should mention our team. Small, as we said. Deliberately so. No revolving doors, no junior account executives learning on your budget. Angela, Quinton, Erik, Dylan and David. These are professionals who are with us because they choose to be. They care about the work. They argue about colour palettes. They stay late not because anyone asks them to, but because the thing isn’t right yet, and they refuse to send it out wrong.

And a special shoutout to our long-term associates, who are truly the best in the business, Melinda and Kevin – you are our family.

You don’t build a 15-year agency with talent alone. You build it with people who give a damn.

Fifteen is an interesting number. Not round enough for a midlife crisis. Not young enough for novelty. It’s the age where you know what you’re good at, you’ve stopped pretending to be good at things you’re not and you’ve finally accepted that the inbox will never be at zero.

It’s the age where whimsy becomes a strategy, not an accident. Where you can say with confidence: We’re not the cheapest. We’re not the biggest. We’re not trying to be either. We’re an agency that shows up prepared, thinks before it designs, designs before it posts and never confuses motion with progress.

Semper in Altum. Always higher.

Here’s to 15 years. Fifteen years of twisted thinking in a topsy-turvy country we love with all our hearts. Fifteen years of early mornings, late nights, fantastic coffee, a little French champagne and breakfast meetings that change everything.

Our toast is warm. The butter soft and the jam homemade, just the way we like it!