About the founder of Will and Wonder
Creativedirectionshapedbyyearsofexperience.
Buildingmyfirstcreativestudio.
In 2010, I landed a job as the sole graphic designer at a small, ten-person company, JackThreads — a menswear ecommerce store. JackThreads originally offered deep discounts on name-brand apparel for a limited time only.
Launching 8-12 new sales everyday, the creative refreshed daily which required an intense level of creative production. Everyday at 8am I'd find out what we were selling at noon, and I had until 11:30 to design all the assets for the storefront, and make the noon send.
Within a year, the production demand had grown such that I hired a small team of designers and built an in-house photo studio to produce original creative for campaigns and curated collections. The business grew rapidly and the demand for creative grew as marketing efforts increased.
A year after that, I moved my family to New York to do it again, but bigger. A second production studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. More hires in our SoHo office. At the peak, I had 25 people reporting to me: studio managers, art directors, photographers, a post-production team, a full digital design team.
Everyday our team produced~8 unique photoshoots, refreshed the site daily, and designed two email sends that hit 8 million inboxes. We grew the business from $4 million to $80 in a four year span.
Keeping up with it all required a non-stop, fast-paced operation with narrow constraints. But that forced constant innovation. And the team made it genuinely fun. That team is still one of the things I'm most proud of.
Learningwhatastorycanreallydo.
In 2017 I moved on from running creative for a menswear ecommerce brand, to something entirely different. I joined Fivestone, a Manhattan-based agency built entirely around nonprofit work. I was a creative producer, pitching and producing content for our clients, telling meaningful stories of their amazing work.
Some of that work was for a special group out of Oklahoma City, an organization called HearingFirst. Their mission is to help families with children who were born deaf get access to hearing technology, and learn to listen and speak. We produced documentary series profiling families they helped directly, and it remains some of the most powerful work I've worked on. Here's the story of one of those wonderful families.
ThebirthofWillandWonder.
'20-'21 brought disruption for a lot of people, myself included. I spent almost two years hustling through the uncertainty that followed. Then, in late 2021, my father passed away suddenly. My world stopped for about six months.
Sitting in a coffee shop one morning, I sat alone with the memories I had of my father, William Gilmore. He started his own custom cabinetry business when he was a young father of two. As a young boy, I'd sit for hours and watch him work in his shop, the Johnstown Mill & Showcase. I remember watching him take raw materials and turn drawings into something massive and beautiful, piece by piece.
In 1992 he was commissioned to build a water wheel for Ameriflora. It was something he took on having never built one before, but he trusted his experience and skill enough to take on the challenge. And he delivered something with craft.
As I sat in that coffee shop, I had finally caught my breath enough to think about what came next for me. I knew I didn't want to be another creative consultant. Instead, I thought about my father taking a bet on himself, starting his own business, and the impact it had on our family. I wanted to do the same for mine.
Will and Wonder is a creative studio born out of the inspiration of my father's legacy: building a business doing something you're great at.
Goingonwonderfuladventures
Today,WillandWonderbringsthatsameexperiencetoeverystoryworthtelling.