Nearly twenty years with one client, and the year that tested it
Crescent Duck Farm has raised Long Island duck since 1908, on land the family has held since the 1600s. We have been their agency for nearly two decades. Most of that work is ordinary: products, recipes, history, a site the family can keep current. Then January 2025 happened, and the site had a job nobody had designed it for.
What you get after eighteen years that you cannot get in a pitch
A long relationship with a client is usually described in warm and unfalsifiable terms. The concrete version is this: we did not have to ask what the brand stands for, who buys from them, or which parts of their history matter. We already knew, because we had been maintaining it for years.
That is what let us recommend a direction and have it taken seriously. A heritage producer selling to white-tablecloth restaurants and Asian food trades does not need a site that performs modernity. It needs one that is quiet, quick, legible, and easy for the family to update — a platform chosen for stability and flexibility rather than for novelty.
The brief was to bring a century-old business into the modern era without making it look like it had been reinvented. Restraint was the design decision. Clean typography and generous white space, with the story and the products carrying the page.
The family legacy gets a plain date and a short paragraph rather than a sepia treatment. Photography of the finished dish does the persuading, because the buyer is a chef.
Whole duck and parts, each with the details a foodservice buyer needs on the page: pack size, class, case weight, and how the bird was raised.
Full ingredient lists and method steps, so a kitchen can actually cook from the page. The history section runs as a dated timeline, which is the format that later turned out to matter.
The site had to carry the hardest year in the farm's history
A bird flu outbreak forced the culling of the entire flock, halting operations that had run continuously on that land for generations. The story went national within days. Suddenly the website was not a brochure. It was where chefs, distributors, neighbors, and reporters went to find out what was true.
We built Back in production: a timeline that tells the year in order, with each stage carrying the coverage that documented it. The farm's own words for the parts that were theirs to say, and outside reporting for everything else.
The flock is culled and operations stop. National attention follows within two days.
Chefs, neighbors, and former customers organize support for laid-off workers. Within weeks the first new chicks hatch.
New breeding stock, new hatchlings, and the patient work of bringing a flock back from nothing.
Doug Corwin is named the Riverhead News-Review's Person of the Year.
Eleven outlets, one year, in date order
Structuring the page around press coverage rather than a company statement was deliberate. A farm asking customers to believe it has recovered is more convincing when the record is someone else's.
Back in production
The farm is producing again. The site that carried the year is the same site we had been quietly maintaining before it, extended when it was needed and edited by the family throughout.
There is a lesson in that worth stating plainly. The value of a long partnership is not visible in a normal year. It shows up the week something goes badly wrong and the client needs to publish something true, fast, without briefing anyone on who they are.
Looking for an agency that will still be here in ten years?
Tell us about your business and how long it has been around. A reply within two business days.
