Every year someone asks us why we didn't set up shop thirty miles north, in the zip codes where the agency logos are louder. Every year the answer gets easier to prove with numbers instead of just conviction.
The ranking nobody expected
In the Financial Times and Nikkei’s Investing in America ranking, Long Beach came in 22nd out of 91 major U.S. cities, climbing forty places from the year before. That alone would be a good year. What actually got our attention is who Long Beach ranked ahead of: San Diego at 29, San Francisco at 31, and Los Angeles at 37. Long Beach is the highest-ranked city in California on that list. Not the biggest. The highest-ranked.
The ranking scores cities on talent and labor force, business environment and operational costs, openness and diversity, infrastructure, and quality of life, the actual mechanics of whether a place is good to build something in, not just good to be photographed in. Mayor Rex Richardson called it a moment the city needed to lean into: "We’re in a really exciting moment as a city right now," he said, adding that Long Beach needs to "double down" on itself rather than measure itself against its bigger neighbor.
We’d argue the city already has been.
What’s actually different about building here
Los Angeles has scale. Nobody’s arguing that away. It has more agencies, more studios, more capital moving through more rounds than a city thirty miles south ever will. But scale isn’t the same thing as room to build. Long Beach has a working international airport and one of the few U.S. ports built to handle modern megavessels, real infrastructure, not brand mythology, sitting inside a city small enough that showing up somewhere twice makes you a regular, not a stranger.
That’s not a small distinction for a creative business. In a city where every block has a competitor, differentiation is a constant, exhausting battle for attention. In a city where you can actually know the other business owners on your street, differentiation happens because you’re building something specific to a place people can name, not something generic enough to run anywhere.
The diversity that shows up in the work
WalletHub’s most recent ranking of ethnic diversity across the country’s largest cities put Long Beach 38th nationally and 7th among California cities specifically, measured across ethnicity and race, language, and birthplace of residents.
“Living in an ethnically diverse city can be an economic benefit, as people bring a wide range of skillsets and approaches to solving problems from their own cultures and national origins.”
Chip Lupo, Analyst, WalletHub
That’s not an abstract civic talking point for us. It’s the room where our own ideas get pressure-tested. A brand strategy built inside a monoculture office reads like it. One built where the people in the room actually grew up somewhere different from each other tends to survive contact with the real world better.
What staying here costs us, and what it’s worth
We’re not going to pretend there’s no tradeoff. Our team is remote and nationwide precisely because Long Beach alone can’t supply every discipline we need at the level we need it. We recruit past the city limits constantly. That’s the honest version of this story, not the version where everything about staying here is free.
But the parts that matter most weren’t for sale anywhere else. A landlord who remembers your name. A coffee shop where the barista knows your order and asks how the pitch went. A city government publicly measuring itself against San Diego and San Francisco and Los Angeles and choosing to compete on substance instead of borrowing someone else’s skyline for a backdrop. You can’t recruit your way into that. You have to actually be from somewhere.
“You can’t recruit your way into a landlord who remembers your name. You have to actually be from somewhere.”
Elizabeth Earlywine, Editor & Director of Brand Communications, HAUS XXIV
