A Sense of Closure

Dear All,

Fifteen years ago, four friends sitting in a garden in Headingley set up Leeds's first web design company. We had one borrowed computer, a bit of bandwidth on friend's 56k lease line, and some space on a webserver (P75 processor and several meg of storage). None of us had a suit, a car, or a mortgage, and only a couple of us had any computer experience to speak of.

Trying to sell our services at the time involved a slow process that began with explaining what the Internet was and then moved on to convincing people that there was anyone using it. To add some more context, Amazon.com sold their first book that month, and there were a mere 20,000 websites worldwide - Netcraft reckons there are now in excess of 240 million. We learned as we went, keeping pace with the development of the Internet (and latterly the broader "new media"), and growing in confidence and competence.

As we learned, we grew. From our first employee ("Jonny Ram", now pushing Tokyo pixels) to our last, more than 110 people have worked together at

Sense, and it has been those people who made the company. Their individual skills and strength as a team took our agency to a point where we did loads of stuff we couldn't have imagined when we started. We got invited to Downing Street (twice), won a pile of awards (some of which now have a new role as pond ornaments), gave speeches and presentations, took £100M's of revenue for our clients, wrote clever articles, paid for lots of training, shared lots of profit, gave cash to charity, and were named SME of the Year (NE) in the 2008 Orange National Business Awards.

But now we're going to shut down.

This hasn't been an easy decision, or a sudden one, but we've always been firm believers in doing the right thing. We've seen too many people owed wages by an employer that goes bust, we've met clients who were left in the lurch in similar circumstances, and we've experienced the pain of a supplier that finds they're not going to get paid. That's not the way we have ever done business, so we took the decision to close down in a controlled and dignified fashion.

Anyway, fuck it, this is a goodbye not a eulogy. We just hope that everyone that was ever a part of Sense (and that includes clients and other agencies we like working with) enjoyed at least some of their time with us. We always wanted to be a place that treated everyone fairly, and while you bastards often made that really hard, we did what we could. You people are doing all manner of random shit these days (TV producer, undertaker, barrister, mother, father, and too many account directors to mention), and in all sorts of random places (even Hull), and good luck to you all. You have all helped to make the last 15 years what they were - thank you.

- Communication ends -