Kwedar & Co. 2025 Year in Review: What We Built, Learned, and What Comes Next
It’s hard to believe 2025 is coming to a close. In many ways, it feels like the year just began.
This was a year that demanded constant adaptation, with new tools, platforms and trends coming and going almost overnight. We spent much of the year working furiously, always three steps ahead while the ground shifted beneath us. Now, with the new year upon us, we’ve done something that feels almost radical after all that bustle and hurry.
We’ve taken a pause.
Instead of launching directly into the next set of priorities, we’ve spent much of the last two weeks pulling the numbers from the past year, parsing them carefully, and reflecting on what it all means for the future.
Why Reflection Can Sometimes Mean More Than Momentum
It’s easy to move from one goal to the next. A new year brings a clean slate and fresh energy, and most businesses jump straight into planning what’s next. Reflection takes more discipline. It requires honesty about what worked, what didn’t, and why. It asks us to look beyond the day-to-day, and make sense of the journey as a whole.
Looking back at the goals we set over the year, we’ve asked ourselves a few hard questions. Did we follow through on what we said we would do? Where did we show up well? Where did we fall short? What do we want to carry forward, and what needs to change?
That process reminded us of something important: appreciation and accountability can exist at the same time.
A Look Back at 2025
When we reflected on the numbers and the work they represented, there was a lot to be proud of.
At Kwedar & Co., we secured 722 pieces of earned coverage for our clients, including articles, newsletter mentions, and social content that positioned them as trusted authorities in their industries. We published 35 press releases on their behalf and created and shared more than 800 social media posts.
We celebrated three internal promotions: Jessica Pickard stepped into the role of Director of Operations, Callie Ward became our Director of Digital Marketing, and Elizabeth Menes was promoted to Director of Story. As we celebrated our eighth anniversary as a company, with our team at the heart of everything we do, seeing that growth reflected internally mattered deeply to us all.
We got to see that growth reflected externally as well. In 2025, our leader, Lauren Cockerell, was named a Woman of Influence by The Business Press. We also received recognition from the Greater Fort Worth Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), earning the Worthy Award for our Seldens New Bassett Showroom press release campaign, along with an Award of Achievement in the integrated communications category.
But reflection is not just about patting yourself on the back. It is about alignment: making sure the work you’re doing matches what you set out to accomplish and clarifying what deserves more focus in the year ahead.
What We Did With the Reflection
Of course, we can’t share client details in a public post. But we can share what this reflection process looked like in practice.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve been translating this year’s work into end-of-year summaries for our clients — not just as a list of outputs, but as a clear story of what moved forward, why it mattered and what it sets up next.
These year-end reports pull together the themes and results that are easy to lose in the day-to-day pace:
The strategic direction we leaned into and the stories we consistently told
The visibility and credibility we helped build through earned media and owned channels
The wins worth repeating and the friction points worth solving
The opportunities we see ahead, based on what we learned this year
In other words, we didn’t gather numbers just to admire them. We gathered them to interpret them, to connect them back to goals and to make smarter decisions about where to spend time, attention and effort in 2026.
Here’s Our Challenge for 2026
Don’t just set goals for the year and tick them off at the end. Instead, build in time to reflect on them — preferably, throughout the year. Sustainable growth does not come from sprinting from milestone to milestone. It comes from moving strategically, checking your direction, and adjusting with intention.
That is the work we are committing to again in the year ahead.
See you in 2026!