When the news broke of Alain Sylvain’s death by suicide in late 2023, there was an outpouring of grief from across the industry for the loss of one of its most celebrated creative minds. The child of Haitian immigrants, Sylvain dedicated most of his personal and working life to New York City, first making a name for himself while working as a strategist at creative agency Mother, followed by a stint as managing director of brand consultancy Redscout.

Sylvain launched his eponymous strategy and design agency in 2010, along with founding partners Joey Camire and Ben Cheney. In the 13 years he spent at the helm as CEO, the 60-person agency built a reputation for innovative ideas and a high-profile client roster including Spotify, the New York Times, PepsiCo and Google. He also spearheaded its expansion to include offices in LA, Virginia and Amsterdam, as well as its acquisition by holding company kyu Collective in 2022.

Widely revered for his leadership abilities, Sylvain was a huge part of CSO Chris Konya’s decision to join the agency in 2017. “Some businesses are more than business, and there are some core beliefs and values that sit at the centre of this organisation that I really valued in him. I saw it in the way that he was building it, the people that were coming here, the way they treated each other, and the way that they believed in each other,” she tells CR.

The same goes for chief design officer Michael Kaye, who was previously Sylvain’s creative partner at Mother almost 20 years ago. “We had developed a partnership in how we work, and it was much more about blurring the lines between what a strategist does and what a creative does,” he notes. “We also liked each other, valued each other’s brains, and valued the things in the other that we might not be able to do on our own. I think that we saw how we were inspired by each other, but how each of us inspired teams in a very human way.”

For nearly 14 years, Sylvain was first and foremost a founder-led company, with Sylvain’s name on the door and his face in public. While the agency had already formed its executive leadership team in 2022 – comprising Konya and Kaye as well as Camire and CFO/CCO Margo Husted – the immediate aftermath of Sylvain’s sudden death was a steep learning curve for all of them, with no blueprint on how to deal with the loss of a company founder.

“Someone had said to me, it’s one foot in front of the other, and that’s really what it was for the beginning parts of it,” says Konya. “The first thing was making sure that we cared for each other and held each other in our grief, and that then led to healing, which everyone has to do in their own way in their own time. And so it was just making space for that, supporting each other through it.”

The leadership team brought in a grief counsellor the week after his death, and through its employee assistance programme offered free sessions with a therapist of people’s choosing. Managers also introduced periodic check-ins with their direct reports and regularly scheduled opportunities for the team to connect socially outside of work. “There was a point directly after we lost Alain when everyone was in the same place. But as time went on, some people moved faster and some people took more time, and we had to care for individuals differently because everyone was in a different place,” says Konya.

We saw and held and understood each other in a way that I don’t think you can under any normal circumstances

While Kaye admits that adapting to this new reality wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, he says “the way in which we came together was in some ways how Alain would approach a project, with the consideration of people at the core and then how do we build from that. But I do think, and this is a big distinction, it wasn’t in service of Alain, it was in service of what Alain wanted – coming together to solve difficult problems that you might not have ever encountered before.”

The other major challenge Sylvain’s passing presented was the reality of running a business that’s still beholden to clients. Thankfully, many of Sylvain’s long-term clients had become close friends over the years, while their newer partners were still incredibly supportive. “I think people had a lot of grace and understanding in terms of what we were going through. We didn’t have a single client who when we said, ‘grief has no timeline’ said, ‘our project has a timeline’. Obviously, we had timelines but we really had to adjust and figure out how do we care for our people and also care for our work, so that was a good balance,” says Konya.

In order for the agency to continue building in the longer term, however, the leadership team also had to think about what the agency’s vision was going forward. “In order to carry a vision out, it has to be something that you feel in your bones and that you can drive yourself, and we really came together in order to build that. This belief that the world changes constantly, and therefore you need to always be thinking about, how do we make it new?” she adds.

Despite the unprecedent challenges 2024 threw at them, it turned out to be one of the agency’s most successful business years to date, as it launched high-profile projects with everyone from Hinge to Walmart. As the team’s work with the WNBA made its way out into the world, the basketball league hit record-breaking attendance numbers and secured $2 billion in sponsorship deals. And its long-term work with the New York Times, helping it move from an advertising to a subscription-based business model, resulted in the publisher finally hitting its goal of 10 million subscribers.

In the end, the agency reported one of its best quarters ever and grew its overall revenue by 9.5%. No mean feat, considering it didn’t have a CEO for most of 2024, only appointing Camire to take the reins at the beginning of this year. “I’d like to give Alain some credit for what was this year, both in terms of our growth individually but also that we were able to grow from a business perspective,” says Kaye. “I think that we had set our sights relatively low in 2024, in order not to pressure the teams and pressure ourselves after such a big event. 2025 I think is really about putting the learnings into practice and similarly not pressuring ourselves.”

In addition to retaining almost all of its clients last year, the agency also had 97% retention rate among its employees. Konya puts much of this down to the resilience of the team and the strength of the bond they’ve built. “That’s not an experience that most people will even have in their lifetimes,” she says. “There was an amount of seeing and understanding that already existed. We saw and held and understood each other in a way that I don’t think you can under any normal circumstances.”

Asked what she thinks Sylvain’s legacy will be, and how it will live on through his eponymous agency, Konya says: “It’s a thing that lives in us now. It’s a thing that we carry on and is just a part of our bones and our being. And so when folks join us, they understand it, they start to feel it, and there is a grounding in some of that carrying of what we’ve been through and celebrating where we’re going now.”

For Kaye, it’s the fact their founder cared so deeply, and they will continue to do so. “We care about what’s going on in the world, we care about each other, we care about the work, and we care about our clients and want them to succeed,” he says. “We talk about ourselves at times as misfits. We have this common thing that just cares about a lot of weird shit, and it’s the caring that’s the legacy. The work’s gonna change, the world’s gonna change, but the reason why we’re going to do great work is because we care.”

sylvain.co