09/01/2026
Our best year was 2020. Our most challenging was 2025. Ten years in, neither one is what anyone guesses.
Ford Media Lab turns ten today. Rachel and I started it on September 1, 2016 with two cameras we didn't know how to use and seventy-five cocktails shot in a pop-up light tent in our Williamsburg apartment for Mount Gay. Not great work by today's standards, but the client was happy and a workflow was born.
The push came from my boss at Rémy Cointreau a few months earlier. I was five years in, running the Collectif 1806 ambassador team, and the people above him wanted to move me somewhere more corporate. I didn't want the desk. I also didn't want another year of 6am airport alarms and 8am morning-show tequila shots. Richard Lambert listened to all of it and suggested a third door. Go do your own thing. And if not now, when.
Since then: four studios, more than forty brands, over $5 million in revenue, and still two people. 2020 was the peak because our clients still needed content and nobody could be in a room, so we streamed the set. 2025 was the hardest because the traditional work dried up, and it's the year we rebuilt the entire business around hybrid AI production while keeping the name on the door.
It worked. The business came back by the end of the year with new clients who arrived for the method and stayed for the two people running it. In 2016 our optimism was two cameras and no idea. Today it's ten years of knowing exactly what correct looks like, plugged into tools that can build things that never could have existed, and most days we still can't believe what comes out the other side. The next ten years look better than the first, and for once we can say that with evidence.
Rachel and I wrote the whole story today, the rug closet in Greenpoint, the magazine that broke our hearts, the $8,115 rent, the day Nano Banana changed the math.
Ten years. Bottled at strength. Still pouring.
-Kyle Ford
Link: https://www.fordmedialab.com/visual-intelligence/ten-years-ford-media-lab
