• Culture

Traitors, trees and tech: 2025 at Brightec

The work that made us grin

At the beginning of the year, we began partnering with Virgin Wines, a mobile app project we’re all hugely excited to build. It’s pulled in a big chunk of our team, sparked lots of creativity and collaboration, and we’ve loved building something with this excellent vintage of a team – bold, smart and genuinely lovely people.

And just a month ago, we started working with Check4Cancer – another aligned partnership, and one that already feels meaningful in the best way. We’re bringing our best technical expertise to build an app that will serve people on their digital pathway. We’re grateful to keep working alongside some truly inspiring organisations.

Another wonderful highlight this year was our second Brightec Exchange. It was a day built around senior leaders sharing honest experiences, asking meaningful questions, and learning from each other. The theme that kept coming up was simple: putting people first – and we’re grateful to work with clients and partners who believe the same.

Behind the scenes, we also created the Growth Lab Team (GLT): a bunch of Brightec humans from different corners of the business, carving out time to build a three year plan to scale sustainably, with the right foundations and aspirational goals for our clients and team.

New hellos and happy milestones

In January, we welcomed Emily to the team as Communications Coordinator – helping us share more of what we’re building, learning and celebrating across the team. And in October, our new Product Manager, Jen, joined us. Jen has more than settled in – she has a scarily good attention to detail, was finding sneaky bugs (thankfully of the code variety) on her literal second day and is already flying in her role.

This year we celebrated some huge Brightec milestones: Alistair, Jotham and Steve marked 10 years, and Georgia and Rob hit 5 years – a real reminder of the talent (and all-round good people) we’re lucky to have around. 

We also celebrated a couple of brilliant promotions this year: Seun stepped up from Junior Software Engineer to Software Engineer, and Ben moved from Junior Product Manager to Product Manager. Both have worked incredibly hard, grown their craft, and made a huge impact on the projects they’ve been involved with – really well deserved.

Planes, trains and Norwich

We’re at our best when we’re building side-by-side with our clients. Alongside regular trips to Virgin and Waterstones HQ, this year also brought some firsts, including meeting the Virgin Wines team in Norwich, and James and Annie going up to spend time with their design team.

What we learned out loud

AI has definitely been one of the biggest conversation-starters this year. So we’ve taken a thoughtful, considered approach to how we use it at Brightec (and when we don’t), keeping it to the contexts where it genuinely adds value. Josh captured some of the senior team’s thinking in this blog. 

We’ve had a stack of other, genuinely insightful posts from the team this year, here are a few highlights: Jotham shared a brilliantly grounded guide to life as an external Product Manager (packed with practical takeaways), Annie thoughtfully explored the generalist path in a design career, and Caz recently shared some refreshingly useful wisdom on empathy as a leadership skill, reflecting on nine years at Brightec.

Another standout moment was co-hosting an accessibility webinar with Zoonou, where our Head of Design, James, shared practical guidance on the European Accessibility Act. We care very deeply about building products everyone can use, so it was brilliant to bring product and accessibility perspectives together in one session.

Looking outwards

We try to make space for the things that matter outside of project work, too. Everyone at Brightec gets the opportunity for five paid volunteering days a year, and this year we’ve loved seeing people put those to use with wonderful charities. From supporting a local foundation, Holos with design work, serving Newday – a national youth festival, to helping to support Chomp, a charity that supports low-income families in Brighton & Hove. Annie (pictured below with her mum!) volunteered at Hearts and Flowers organics, which looks to improve biodiversity and supports local community groups with free activities. Volunteer days are one of those small-on-paper things that can have a genuinely meaningful ripple effect – for the charities we support, and for our team too. Elle summed it up perfectly in her blog on the impact of volunteering days (and why we’re so keen to protect that time).

And while awards aren’t the goal, it was a really lovely moment to be recognised for the culture we’re trying to build. We were shortlisted for the UK Company Culture Awards in ‘Best Agency to Work For’ and ‘Most Innovative Culture’, and also being named in the Top 50 Inspiring Workplaces Award UK. We don’t pretend to have it all figured out, but we care a lot about creating an environment where people can flourish, keep learning, and do their best work.

Cake, round tables & cosy endings

Of course, a few of our favourite moments had nothing to do with work.

We had a lot of fun jumping on the cultural moment that is Celebrity Traitors with our very own round table, complete with scribbled post-it votes, strong opinions, and an alarming amount of confidence for zero evidence. Poor Dave didn’t make it out unscathed either…promptly banished as a ‘traitor’ for being the master of misdirection (make of that what you will).

We all loved taking time for a proper reset at Wilderness Wood – swapping screens for fresh forest air (which was a lie because it was actually boiling). There was coffee in hand, a lot of laughs, and something oddly therapeutic about taking any residual angst out on trees with an axe. We learned how to make fire and honestly just enjoyed stepping away together, topped off with an incredible BBQ courtesy of a few resident chicken-wing experts.

And then came the Christmas sugar high: a Studio Monday stacked with an insanely talented spread of bakes. Think: reindeer brownies, pumpkin pie, and someone even recreated After Eights so they were vegan – honestly, incredible. The results were tight indeed.

As we get ready to close our laptops for the year, we just want to say how grateful we are for another brilliant year at Brightec. For our growing team, the friendships we’ve built, and the amazing clients we get to work alongside. We’re heading into 2026 feeling excited about what’s coming next, including two big project launches and plenty more besides.

Merry Christmas from all of us. 

 (We are taking a well-deserved break over the Christmas period and will be back in the studio on January 5th. But if you are an existing client and need urgent support, please contact [email protected])