Every October the costume box comes out of storage, and every October we pretend the dogs don't have opinions about what's inside it. They do. This year we stopped pretending and let each one "pick" the costume that actually fits who they are, and the results tell you more about this pack than any staff bio ever could.
The costume box comes out every October
We don’t do a lot of forced fun around here. Costumes are the exception. Every year, a week or so before Halloween, someone hauls the bin down from the storage shelf and the loft turns into a fitting room for a few chaotic hours. It started small, one bandana, one year. It has since become the kind of tradition nobody wants to be the one to cancel.
This year we tried something different. Instead of grabbing whatever was left in the bin and forcing it onto whichever dog stood still the longest, we asked a real question first: if each of these four actually got to choose, what would they choose. Not what’s cute. What fits the personality that already shows up in client meetings and every ordinary Tuesday around here. Turns out the answer was obvious the second we asked it. We just had to stop overthinking the costumes and start reading the dogs.
Hudson goes classic, because Hudson always does
Hudson doesn’t do subtle, and he doesn’t do cute for cute’s sake. He does crowd-pleaser, every time, without fail. So when it came time to pick, there was only one option on the table: the hot dog costume, bun and all, the kind of thing that gets a laugh from everyone who walks through the door.
It’s the safest costume in the bin and somehow the one that lands hardest. That’s Hudson’s whole approach to life. He’s not trying to be clever. He’s trying to make sure every person who sees him has a better day than they were having thirty seconds ago, and a golden retriever in a bun costume does that job better than almost anything we own. He wore it to three separate meetings before we retired it, wagging through every one like the bun had become part of him.
Houston picks the costume that fits his record
Houston’s costume required zero debate. We have a bin’s worth of stolen pens and one demolished ribbon spool on record, and a resume like that only points one direction: the burglar costume. Black and white stripes, a small mask over the eyes, and a tiny drawstring bag labeled LOOT that he dragged around for two straight days like evidence he was proud of.
He leaned into the bit harder than we expected. He’d trot up to a desk, sniff around like he was casing it, then wander off with something small enough to fit in his mouth: a stress ball, a hair tie, once an entire granola bar wrapper. Nobody was actually mad. He’s not sneaky because he means harm. He’s sneaky because he genuinely believes the fun is in the getting away with it, and this year he finally had the wardrobe to match the reputation.
“Houston’s been cosplaying a burglar since the day he got here. We just finally gave him the costume for it. The mask didn’t change a single thing about how he operates, it just made it official.”
Devon Reyes, Motion & Photography Lead
Sapphy keeps it quiet. Hachi does not.
Sapphy’s costume needed to reward a second look, not a first one. She’s the one who watches a room before she joins it, the one who reads the whole situation before deciding it’s worth her attention. So we put her in a small deerstalker cap with a tiny magnifying glass on her collar, a quiet detective costume for a dog who already knows exactly what’s going on in every room she enters. She wore it the way she wears everything: calm, a little amused, entirely unbothered.
Hachi’s costume needed to survive contact with Hachi, and honestly, it didn’t. We tried an inflatable dinosaur costume, spikes down the back, and within twenty minutes it had a torn seam and a strap migrated to the wrong leg. She didn’t slow down for any of it. She sprinted a full lap around the loft with the tail dragging sideways behind her, knocked over a stack of mood boards, and greeted the whole thing like the costume falling apart mid-run was part of the performance. In a lot of ways, it was.
The contest, and the closest thing to a winner
We ran an actual vote at the end of the day, sticky notes on a whiteboard, one per person, no campaigning allowed, though someone definitely tried to lobby for Hudson with a granola bar bribe. The results were close enough that we called it a four-way tie and moved on with our afternoon.
The real point is that four very different dogs looked at the same costume box and each one walked away with exactly the right thing, without anyone forcing the match. That’s what happens when you pay attention to who someone is before you decide what fits them, whether that someone has four legs or sits across the table in a brand strategy session. We do the same work for every client who walks through our door. We don’t hand out costumes that don’t fit. We find the one that was always theirs.
“I watched four dogs get dressed up as versions of themselves and thought, that’s the whole job, actually. Figure out who someone really is, then build them something that fits that truth instead of hiding it. The dogs just made it funnier to watch.”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO
