Heritage
Where Homemade comes from. The residency, the chefs, the house rules and the founding story.
I’m justIsaiah.
The Residency is a podcast-style series at Hmde. that explores the chefs who make up our kitchen. Monthly, we sit down with no agenda, just two people finding out how the other one thinks.
At Hmde., the people who run the work are called chefs. Our first sit-down features Chef Isaiah, employee number one at Hmde. See what Isaiah has to say about life in a rapidly changing world of technology.
READ THE FULL CONVERSATION“If you don’t know how to do the long way first, you can’t appreciate the shortcut.”
Every dish hassomeone’s name on it.
Hmde. doesn’t exist without the people who show up to cook.
That’s not a sentiment for an About page. It’s the actual model. Every solution on this site, strategy, creative, media, events, was made by a person who chose to be here, trained to be good at it, and stayed because the work asked something real of them.
That’s the bet the company makes on purpose: not the biggest bench, the best-trained one. Every chef runs a Growth Chapter of their own, a personal goal for the next stretch of their career, checked against the same things the company checks itself against. Nobody waits a year to find out how they’re doing.
AI has a station in this kitchen, same as everywhere else on this site. It never gets the one that decides what ships. That call stays with a trained person, every time, because judgment doesn’t scale by adding headcount. It grows one chef at a time.
House rules.
Before there was a name for any of this, before there was a company to register, there were four things the founders actually believed, and never really talked themselves out of.
If you can, it will be done.
Operate from opportunity, not fear.
Everyone eats together. No one can do it alone.
Never stop growing, and be curious.
The best kitchens I’ve ever seen were small.
I often think about how our first memories shape who we are. One that stands out for me is helping my mother make lasagna during the holidays. It was a full-day activity. We had a very small kitchen, and although I didn’t see it back then, everything had its place for rolling the dough into sheets, making the sugo (marinara), and preparing all the ingredients. The finale was putting it all together, layer by layer, and placing it in the oven. Each piece was made to near perfection. When the lasagna came out, it was a work of art.
It’s debatable whether I’ve been able to outdo my Ma’s lasagna. My belief is her instruction, and more importantly, her needing my help as part of our heritage, inspired me to make my own version. Now there are two amazing lasagnas out there.
This memory led to the name of Homemade Pasta. Perfecting the process and mastering the craft are so important in the kitchen, because both lead to innovation and experimentation. There will always be new interpretations of pasta, which has so many parallels in marketing. As an agency, my hope is we always strive to make things different and better. With that, let’s make some pasta.
Salute.
I am drawn to cooking because it’s honest. You can follow a recipe exactly and still get it wrong if the oven runs hot or the flour is drier than usual, so you learn to taste as you go. Marketing works the same way for me. There’s real science in it, and the numbers matter. But I can usually tell a campaign is working before the report proves it, and that instinct only comes from doing the work.
I like taking new tools apart to see how they work, and AI is the most interesting one I’ve picked up. A few of us can now finish overnight the research that used to take a week, and take on work that once needed a much bigger team. I still treat it like a good prep cook. It handles the prep, and a person tastes the dish and decides whether it goes out.
Service is what keeps me here. A good kitchen on a busy night is a team in sync, and nobody in the dining room can tell how close it got. That’s what I want for our clients and our crew. When someone on the team takes over a station they couldn’t run a year ago and does well with it, I’m prouder of that than of anything I’ve made myself.
Yes, Chef.
Building something different on purpose. Senior Operators using the right tools.
Tell us whatyou need.
We will get right on it. What you write here goes to a person who can actually answer it, and the person who answers is the person who will do the work.
Heard, chef.
It’s with a person now. You’ll hear back from the one who will do the work.
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