Humble Humans

Humble Humans started as Greg Edgerton’s design agency. Greg was a member at Cowerks, and we kept finding ourselves on the same projects: his studio doing the design work, DBL Systems doing the backend development, Cowerks acting as the sales and marketing arm. At some point the obvious thing was to stop coordinating three companies and become one, so we joined forces and rebranded together under his name.

What came out of it was a full-service agency. We did naming and branding, backend software, mobile applications, big data work, and most of what falls between those. At its height we had eleven full-time designers and developers plus sales staff and contractors. It was hard work and it was genuinely rewarding, and we got to build some things I’m still glad we built.

The agency model is a difficult business, though. Carrying that much overhead stopped making sense in a market where smaller teams were becoming the norm, so we scaled back and eventually wound it down. I like working on a team. I like client work considerably less than working on our own projects, and by then our own projects were ramping up. Shifting direction was the right call, and looking at what AI has done to the agency business since, it was more right than we knew at the time.