Auckland Agency Launches Groundbreaking 'Moodboards Anonymous' Support Group for Burnt-Out Creatives
AUCKLAND, NZ – In what industry insiders are calling 'brave' and 'weirdly overdue', boutique agency Feral Gravy has announced the launch of Moodboards Anonymous, a weekly support group for creatives who’ve lost the will to pin another cut-out of a Balenciaga runway on recycled foamcore.
The group, which meets every Wednesday at 6:30pm in a repurposed shipping container behind the agency’s Grey Lynn office, is open to anyone who has felt personally victimised by a 200-slide client moodboard brief. Each session begins with a confession circle, where attendees share their tipping point. Highlights so far include a junior designer who was asked to make a moodboard ‘inspired by Swedish fishing villages but sexy’, and an art director who hasn’t looked at a normal chair in three years.
Agency co-founder Dustin Pellick, who once moodboarded for a campaign about sustainable cheese, says the idea came after an internal Slack thread unironically titled #MoodboardShame hit 143 messages in under an hour. 'We realised we’d gone too far when someone pasted in a JPEG of moss and just wrote “vibes?”' Pellick said. 'It was time to heal.'
Feral Gravy is reportedly in talks with three major publishing houses about a coffee table book documenting attendees’ works-in-progress, tentatively titled “Unrealised Templates: Helvetica and Tears”. HBO New Zealand has already passed, citing 'too relatable'.
Sessions finish with herbal tea and a group vow to never again describe something as ‘elevated Scandi, with a splash of Dune’.
The group, which meets every Wednesday at 6:30pm in a repurposed shipping container behind the agency’s Grey Lynn office, is open to anyone who has felt personally victimised by a 200-slide client moodboard brief. Each session begins with a confession circle, where attendees share their tipping point. Highlights so far include a junior designer who was asked to make a moodboard ‘inspired by Swedish fishing villages but sexy’, and an art director who hasn’t looked at a normal chair in three years.
Agency co-founder Dustin Pellick, who once moodboarded for a campaign about sustainable cheese, says the idea came after an internal Slack thread unironically titled #MoodboardShame hit 143 messages in under an hour. 'We realised we’d gone too far when someone pasted in a JPEG of moss and just wrote “vibes?”' Pellick said. 'It was time to heal.'
Feral Gravy is reportedly in talks with three major publishing houses about a coffee table book documenting attendees’ works-in-progress, tentatively titled “Unrealised Templates: Helvetica and Tears”. HBO New Zealand has already passed, citing 'too relatable'.
Sessions finish with herbal tea and a group vow to never again describe something as ‘elevated Scandi, with a splash of Dune’.