What IWBFD Begins in 2026
IWBFD Studios is a talent agency and a project studio, and the two are the same job. We represent people, and to raise what those people are worth we design and build the projects they will be worth it in. An agency that only places talent is waiting for someone else to make the work. We make the work.
Everything written here is beginning, not finished. 2026 is the year that principle stops being a description and starts being a schedule — three pilot projects, opened at the same time, each designed around people we believe are undervalued by the market's arithmetic. New For The Olds, Life to Death. Every ending is a threshold. We are about to find out what that looks like in practice.
NEW FOR THE OLDS
Global conventions have run on the same grammar for four decades — a hall, a stage, a badge — and the assumption has been that the format is simply old. We think it is unfinished. Intercom carries forty years of global event execution and the relationships that come with it; IWBFD brings the storytelling layer that can make that infrastructure legible to a new century.
New for the olds is neither preservation nor replacement. It means putting a new business model, a new method of execution, and new technology inside the way a forty-year-old organization already works — and carrying a proven record of domestic success outward, so that the next forty years are built globally rather than repeated locally.
We are deliberate about where we do this. MICE is high value-added work, and in the age of AI it belongs to the narrow set of categories that become more valuable rather than less: it exists to gather the people who cannot be replaced. Intercom has already proven it can win in that category. IWBFD's task is to add new value on top of that proof and to open the markets that proof has not yet reached.
Over the coming year we will introduce AI and digital rebranding work onto a live global convention stage for the first time, and in doing so begin building something less visible but more durable: a standing slate of projects, some permanent and some one-off, where the people we represent can be placed as speakers, curators and directors. That is the agency logic underneath it. A convention is not only a client — it is a stage we can design, and a designed stage is where a talent's value becomes visible and priceable.
If a forty-year-old business can be regenerated without erasing what made it valuable in the first place, the method travels.
Our first pilot begins with Intercom Co., Ltd., and with a question about stages.
LIFE TO DEATH
The second pilot begins with a return, and with a precise definition of death. Nobody has died. What ends in a creative career — the contract, the title, the phone that stops ringing — is a career death, and the industry treats it as the final one. It isn't. It is the point at which rebuilding becomes possible, and it is the only kind of death this studio is interested in. The name reads in that direction — not life until death, but life given to death. An ending is not what we work toward. It is what we work on.
Master Thomas HongTack Kim joins IWBFD as the first irreplaceable talent. Rather than simply placing him at the top of an existing structure, we did the thing that is actually our job: we analyzed him — what he built, how he built it, which parts of his method are transferable and which parts only he can perform — and designed a something new around the answer.
That ancswer is Creative Act Collective. Its premise is that brand activism is not a CSR line bolted onto a campaign but a working method for the creative and marketing industries, one that produces impact and revenue at the same time instead of trading one against the other.
Most agencies still treat that as a choice. Creative Act Collective is built on the wager that the choice is false, and that a generation of clients is already looking for someone willing to say so.
Everything under this pilot is approached as career rebuilding — his first, and most publicly, and then the collective of creatives who gather around him. A large-scale campaign on regeneration and resurrection, and a retrospective publication that reads less like a memoir than a working manual for coming back.
A master's second act, executed in public and in real time, is the most honest test of the studio's central claim. It either holds or it doesn't, and everyone will be able to see which.
FOREST 101
The third pilot is about people, and it is the one we have been building toward the longest.
Forest 101 is a program that grows idols, actors, athletes, entertainers, influencers and artists into global entrepreneurs. Twenty years — August 18, 2026 to August 18, 2046 — and 101 of them, found one at a time.
They spend a decade building something genuinely rare: an audience, a discipline, a name, an instinct for timing and attention that no business school teaches. Then the contract ends, the body changes, the algorithm moves on, and the market informs them that the asset has expired. It has not expired. It has never been converted. Forest 101 is that conversion.
But a forest is not a curriculum you write first and populate afterward. It is planted. So the program begins not with an intake form but with a business we are actually building — in public, on real ground, with real consequences.
That business is BigCeed.
The coffee industry throws away the cherry. The fruit around the bean — the cascara — is discarded as waste, in enormous volume, every harvest. BigCeed upcycles it: a premium single-estate coffee cherry tea, made with partners on the coffee lands of Colombia. We chose it because the product is the philosophy in physical form. A discarded cherry, reborn as something people pay for and love, is the same story as a performer whose first career ended and whose second has not yet been built.
On August 10, 2026, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake tore through those same lands — the strongest recorded in Colombia this century, straight across the coffee heartland. The families we were building the brand with are sleeping outside buildings that are still standing but no longer trusted. We had planned to reveal all of it a year later, at SXSW 2027. We are not waiting. BigCeed's first act is a shelter campaign, Women for Women, run by Fundación Zona J with IWCA Colombia — organizations that already had the names and the addresses before the ground moved. IWBFD Studios takes no fee, no commission, and no expenses from it. We are the introduction, not the intermediary.
And this is where Forest 101 actually begins.
Building BigCeed out loud — the sourcing, the brand, the campaign, the failures, the numbers as they come back from Colombia — is not a detour from the search for 101 people. It is the search. A program that advertises for candidates attracts applicants. A project that is visibly being built attracts the people who cannot help joining in: the designer who offers work, the brand that commits a share of sales, the retired artist who reads it and recognizes their own ending in it. Those are the seeds. We will run the experiments in the open, record what happens, and publish it as it goes — and the retired artists we find that way are the ones we intend to build the next twenty years with.
We expect the first entrepreneur to be found and to begin in 2027. This year is for building the ground they will stand on.
And we would rather be honest about the rest. We are starting BigCeed in Colombia, and we said Forest 101 would start with a retired K-pop idol. But neither of those is really the boundary of the thing. A harvest lost to an earthquake and a career ended by an algorithm are the same event in different clothing, and that event is ordinary — it happens everywhere, to almost everyone, eventually. Which means we do not yet know what this becomes. We know the ground we are standing on, the people we are standing with, and the twenty years we have committed to. The rest we intend to find out in public, with the record kept as we go.
Four seeds, one soil.
Intercom, Thomas HongTack Kim, Forest 101 with BigCeed, and bcd-W Magazine with Sim Eternal City stand on their own. Each is a complete project with its own logic, its own audience, its own reason to exist — and each could succeed or fail without deciding the fate of the others. They are not four phases of one plan. Four seeds, planted the same season, in four different industries.
The fourth is the one that proves we are not only asking other people to do this. bcd-W Magazine reads the cities that exist now — one city, one story, many tellings — and Sim Eternal City builds the one that does not yet exist, a place designed for climate-displaced elders and the humanoid citizens who will live beside them. Paul is IWBFD's first signed artist, and this is his own work: the studio's method run on the founder before it is run on anyone else. An agency that cannot convert its own talent has no business converting anyone else's.
What connects the four is not structure. It is a person, and then another person. A stage designed for a convention becomes the place a retired athlete first speaks in public. A city story finds its subject in a coffee town rebuilding after an earthquake. A brand built for a message finds its designer among the people who arrived for a campaign. None of that is engineered in advance. It happens because the same studio is holding all four, and because we are watching people rather than deliverables. The connection is indirect, and we prefer it that way — indirect connections survive the failure of any one project.
The same is true of what we say. New for the olds. Life to death. Forest 101. Each is its own idea, and each can be argued with separately. We have never needed them to resolve into a single slogan, because they were never three descriptions of one thing. They are three ways of arriving at the same place.
And that place is the soil. All four seeds are planted in people.
Tending the soil.
The everyday work of IWBFD Studios is not managing four projects. It is three things, done continuously, all year, underneath everything else.
We go looking for good talent.
Not during an application window, not at a cohort intake. As a habit: in the rooms our clients bring us into, in the messages that arrive after something we published, on the site of a project that had nothing to do with recruiting. We go to where they are rather than waiting for them to find the form.
We sign them, and then the real work starts.
A contract is the beginning of a relationship, not proof of one. What we are actually building is trust, and eventually friendship — because the analysis we do cannot be performed on a stranger. It takes time to understand what a person is genuinely good at, what they carry that cannot be copied, what they would still be doing if no one were paying, and which part of their history they have never once been paid for. Most careers are mispriced because nobody ever looked that closely.
And then we design new projects out of what we found, and launch them.
This is the part that makes us an agency rather than a school. We do not fit people into openings that already exist; the project is drawn from the talent, built to the shape of what that specific person can do that no one else can. Every one of the four pillars started this way, and the fifth and sixth will too. The pillars are not a fixed set. They are simply the projects that exist because of the people we have found so far.
Four seeds, one soil, tended every day.
2026 completes four structures — Intercom as the stage in the MICE industry, Thomas HongTack Kim as a Creative ACTs collective in the creative industry, Forest 101 as artists and athletes in job creation, bcd-W and Sim Eternal City as the horizon in city storytelling — and sets the everyday work turning inside them. None of it is proven yet. That is precisely why it is worth watching.
Not a launch year. A year one.
IWBFD Studios
New For The Olds with Xesange! Friends·
Life to Death with Creative Act Collective ·
Forest 101 with BigCeed ·
bcd-W with Sim Eternal City
By the irreplaceable talents, for the irreplaceable talents.
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