Part 3 of “The Long Way to RPPL: What Positive Culture Actually Looks Like” — a series on two decades in the creative industry, and what they taught me about building a company on purpose.
Big Drop is where I grew the most as a creative — and where I learned the hardest lessons about integrity.
I started there as a Lead Designer, working closely with the UI and UX teams to shape a holistic vision for each project rather than just executing whatever came down the pipeline. Over time, I used what I’d built up over the previous decade — the print discipline from KPF, the brand instincts from Berry Creative, the client-facing composure from The Seventh Art — to introduce and build out something that hadn’t existed there before: an entire branding services arm. Before that, Big Drop was strictly a web design shop. Watching that grow from an idea I pitched into a real, functioning part of the business was one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my career.
For a while, the culture matched the ambition. It was the kind of place where good ideas could come from anyone, where the people at the top treated the people doing the work like partners rather than resources. I leaned into everything I’d learned up to that point — listening to my team, treating clients with honesty instead of deference, building an environment where people felt like equal contributors instead of cogs.
But cultures aren’t static, and they don’t sustain themselves. Over time, some of the people who had built and protected that culture moved on. And as they left, I watched something shift. Priorities shifted, in ways both subtle and not, and the quality of life that had once felt like a given started to feel less certain.
That shift is ultimately what led to my departure. Not one dramatic moment, but a slow recognition that I could keep fighting for a culture from the inside only so long before I needed to go build one from scratch instead.
That’s the part of this story that matters most for this series. I didn’t leave because the work stopped being interesting — the branding arm I’d built was thriving, the clients were incredible, the creative output was some of the best of my career. I left because I’d learned, the hard way, that culture isn’t something a company earns once and keeps forever. It has to be protected, deliberately, by the people in the room — and when the people protecting it leave or lose interest, it erodes fast, no matter how good the work still looks on paper.
I didn’t know it yet, but that recognition — that I’d rather build something small and intentional than keep defending something large and drifting — was the last piece I needed before starting RPPL Studio.
Next: the decision to leave and build something new, and what “positive culture” actually means when you’re the one responsible for creating it instead of just protecting it.
