I sat flipping through the Dallas Morning News Sunday afternoon when I came across an article about how San Francisco’s Boudin has been baking from the same “mother dough” since 1849. It was once rescued from the great earthquake of 1906 when Louis Boudin fled with a bucket full before the bakery burnt down. Now every month they ship 30 to 40 pounds of fresh mother dough to their outlying locations with instructions to burn the old and feed the fresh.

I immediately connected with the notion of “mother dough” working in the creative field that we do.

While perhaps not as tidy a process as prepping and baking fresh loaves of bread each day there is commonality in the notion of generating and fulfilling creative work. And in an agency setting we often need to return to our “mother dough” or our driving creative vision for Swash Labs.

Sometimes this fresh infusion is time in mentor-ship with our founder, Josh. Regeneration can also come in time spent together working on the shop and stepping back to look at our long term goals. (I wanted to mention something about the Forrest for the Trees but now we've just got too many metaphors in this post!) We also gain creative strength when we invest in ourselves at the individual level through personal and professional development.