Trestles, a new creative agency in the District, is getting ready to exit beta. According to Rebecca Horton, who co-founded the agency with Catherine Woodiwiss, the company will have its official launch in the next few weeks. She and Woodiwiss have hired a paid intern for the fall to assist with a growing client list, and the pair has scheduled a series of creativity workshops at
Canvas Co/Work.
"We're in beta 2.0," explains Horton. "Trestles emerged out of a project for design school. [We're in a] paid beta version. We're just testing price points and we will pivot from there."
Trestles works to bring out what Horton calls "emerging cross sector potential." The company helps individuals and businesses think in "new and different ways. We pull people in from different disciplines…and [give] them a context so they can work together," Horton says.
Horton and Woodiwiss have fostered lateral thinking with the think tank
GovLab at Deloitte, a competitive program within the company that Horton says "encourages thinking in a nonlinear ways to build something new and different." Trestles also completed a long-term project at the nonprofit
Ashoka to assist with "organizational challenges [that come when] an organization learns, grows and adapts very quickly," she explains.
At the individual level, Trestles meets with people who seek new challenges or wish to develop new skills. "We're piloting a program to train people in the tools and techniques [they can use] in everyday challenges," Horton explains. "[Our] tools and methods that can move a process along come from the design world. We can encourage and inspire [people] to step into new areas."
"Ideally, we'd have two workshops per month," she says. "But we'll scale based on demand."