Chapeaux!! We’re all pretty flipping excited!

Also, we’re running out of room in London. We’ve almost maxed out our legal toilet-ratio limit in London, where we are now 45 people and a dog. (*Dog not involved in toilet-ratio calculations). We have an amazing office on the canal and a brilliant team, and we don’t really want to get bigger right now in the UK. We want to keep growing though - so we basically had to grow a whole new limb.

And we see exploding demand for the kind of stuff we do. Everyone seems to want to make new digital products and services. New York is a natural next move for us in terms of its concentration of media companies, global brands, products and service innovation - not to mention its start-up scene and incredible talent. It’s a long time coming: we’ve been talking about it for, like, six years.

We are very lucky to be rooming with Percolate (@percolate) in SoHo. Massive thanks to Percolate and to Noah (@heyitsnoah) for having us in your house.

We’re also very pleased to say that we've been joined by Gavin Becker, also known as @grokstar, who joins as our new Managing Partner in New York. Gavin will be leading business development and strategy, and helping us to grow the business in the US. We’ve all known Gavin for a long time. Bizarrely, he appears in the photograph below that we just found on Flickr. It’s the TownHoller party at SXSW from 2010. We’re in it too. Gavin appears to be photo-bombing it.

So yeah, that’s a strange coincidence, but obviously it’s not entirely why we hired him: he’s also done this before - helping to launch AKQA in NY, as well as stints at Wolff Olins, Ogilvy, Twitter and his own start-up Bondsy. It’s the kind of mix we like at MxM.

Gavin and Stuart will be joined by Paul Sims (@saulpims) next week - on a short tour of duty - and Chris Bell (@cjbell88), co-founder of Front End London (@frontendlondon) is moving out there permanently next month. Any front-enders reading this take note: Chris will be hosting the inaugural Front End New York (#feny) at the end of October. I just want to underline the fact that this isn’t some kind of faux-service-office that we’ve opened. We will be employing strategists, designers, developers - everything we need to be able to do complete projects in New York.

We were six years old as a company this week. Yes, we opened for business in NYC on 3 September, the same day we opened in London in 2007. That’s not sentimentalism by the way - you know, just in case you were thinking we sound like a bunch of emotional idiots. No, it’s just easier for company accounting to have the same fiscal year. *That’s how serious we are. *

Above all, we are looking forward to doing great work with great people in a great new place. We are in New York to learn and take our whole experiment to a new level.

So there you go. Please get in touch, especially if you’re a national space agency or world-famous zoo or something. Don't be a stranger.

Lastly, thanks to our brave and brilliant clients, our amazing team at Made by Many, all the people who’ve helped us to grow. Thanks for all that.

As ever, we shall keep the boxes. ;)