Some Kind Words from Our Clients and Community in 2025

“I truly appreciated the professionalism, insight, and positive energy your team brought to the work. I’m looking forward to future opportunities to partner together again.”

“The presentation went really well and we had such a great discussion around features, email journeys and promo ideas. The Made Manifest team crushed it as per usual!”

“Your talk was a HIT!! You were a breath of fresh air and got everyone energized and inspired.”

“Thank you so much for joining the class this morning. Your energy is awesome!!”

“That was an excellent example of "right sizing" content to the time we had available. Loved the mix of mini-teach and pair-share.”

“I just wanted to say how much I love your content. It's smart and fun to read!”

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The 101 on Made Manifest

In case you haven’t met us yet, Made Manifest is a service design consultancy - we love working with a really wide range of clients across the private, public and non–profit sectors. What many of our clients have in common is the desire to use the tools of design to create services that work better for the people delivering them and using them! We do this through three main offerings: consulting, capacity building, and perspectives. 

We continue to work with our wonderful core team and extended network of trusted, longtime collaborators - enabling us to deliver incredible results for our clients.

Consulting Work Highlights

In 2025 we worked on 8 consulting projects, with six clients, evenly split between 3 new and 3 returning clients. We continued to work across the public and private sectors, with 2025 industries including energy, healthcare and pharma, regulatory compliance, and consumer packaged goods/skincare.

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Our ongoing focus is service design work - meaning complex challenges that span many touchpoints, channels and stakeholders. Some of the projects we tackled in 2025 included:

• Understanding what makes for a loyal buyer of skincare online, exploring qualitative research and the competitive landscape for a high end, science backed brand. 
• Complex, multi-ministry discovery exploring service patterns in the regulatory compliance space across sectors for the Ontario government.

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• Driving uptake of energy efficiency programs and grants for small and medium sized businesses in British Columbia.
• Creating a new visual identity for an innovative sports, rec and leisure program. 
• Measuring the impact of point of care testing within long term care facilities as part of a pilot program, looking at both quantitative and qualitative indicators.

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We’re so grateful for the opportunity to contribute to these projects, and to our client’s commitment to delivering services that meet the needs of users, customers, citizens, staff and stakeholders. 

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Capacity Building Highlights

Alongside our consulting work, we love supporting teams and individuals to grow their service design capacity. A 2025 highlight was building out a day long, in person, custom service blueprinting training for one of Canada’s largest financial institutions. We had 20 attendees from a range of teams and levels, including senior directors, and the feedback was glowing. 

• “Thank you so much for sharing your time & expertise with us today. This was a fantastic session that I will be able to take back to my team and work.”
• “The session was super engaging.”

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• Participants rated “How likely are you to use what you learned?” an average of 6.4 / 7.
• “This session was worth my time” received an average score of 6.6 / 7, indicating strong perceived value.
• The recommendation question “I would recommend this training to a design colleague or friend” received an average score of 9.6 / 10. The resulting Net Promoter Score (NPS) is 85, which is considered excellent.

We pride ourselves on delivering an exceptional workshop experience and wrote about some of our approaches in an edition of Ask a Service Designer. 

Connecting with our community through public sessions is also a huge pleasure, and in 2025 we hosted folks for workshops and events on:

• Overcoming perfectionism and writing about your design practice online
• GenAI Storyboarding for Service Design
• Pebble Talk Project Showcase!
• Getting the Most Out of Warm Up Questions

We also continued to offer two self paced online courses, on research recruitment and one easy trick for better meetings ;), as well as our hugely popular Pebble Talk facilitation card deck.

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Perspectives Highlights

Ask a Service Designer newsletter is going strong with 12 editions in 2025, including service prototypes from real projects, a candid interview with a product manager on working with service designers, a guest edition from Amanda Kennedy on getting scope right in your projects, and a hugely popular blow by blow of my kid’s pediatric dentist experience. 

In 2025 we delivered several talks including: 

• In March, we had the pleasure of joining the Empower and Connect panel event, hosted by the wonderful Erin Helcl. Alongside panelists Samantha, Tania, Mojgan and expertly hosted by Mariam, I had the pleasure of sharing candid experiences of entrepreneurship and career development with an engaged group of diverse women. 

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• In April, we had the honour of being part of the SDN Next Gen Conference 2025, joining a panel on The Invisible Work of Service Design: Building Influence, Trust & Measurable Impact, with fellow panellists Ana, Ruth and Sebastian.  
• In May, Linn had the pleasure of joining legends like Nathasha Jen, Karim Rashid and Debbie Millman who have been on the Unique Ways podcast. In the interview we talked about how where we are shapes your design practice, my favourite saying, and dealing with work/life balance.
• In June, we shared service design mapping approaches with Master of Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at U of T students. We packed in service design foundations, case study examples and a hands-on activity! 
• In September, we presented at the City of Vancouver Digital Service Delivery Divisional Meeting on Setting the Conditions for Service Design in the Public Sector.  

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And finally, a big highlight of the year was running an interactive session at the DesignX Leadership Summit in November. This conference is one of my favorites, and getting to host a session was a dream come true. (Shout out to Preet and team!)

Our session on Facilitation Snacks for Leaders: Mini Connection Tools was a huge success and we had so much fun teaching three easy and effective techniques: our beloved meeting rounds (using Pebble Talk of course), co-creative drawing, and a positive psychology game. 

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Good Things / Fun Things

Our 4 day work week is going strong, now in our 3rd year. 

In January, we raised $750 USD for someone who lost their home in the LA fires, as part of a Designer led fundraiser. You can check out the‘Should I start a newsletter’ livestream hosted by Lex with Florian :). 

We continue to donate 1% of topline to environmental non-profits via our 1% for the planet commitment, and in 2025 this brings our lifetime donations to over $30,000. We also participated in the 1% for the planet auction, donating a Meaningful Meetings bundle including our Pebble Talk card deck, contributing to a fundraising effort that raised $126,000 for environmental causes. 

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Time together as a team is hugely important to us, and we enjoyed team social and professional development time including: 

• A session from the wonderful Charley Pothecary of Inclusively on inclusive user research in difficult subject spaces.
• Getting cute manicures as a team (mine was belated Valentine’s themed!).

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• Lunch at Sugo.

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• Team coffee AI chat / bookclub at Reunion Coffee Roasters where we discussed this interview with the amazing Karen Hao (who wrote Empire of AI).
• Breakfast at The Federal.
• Enjoyed some retro graphic design at the Retail Retrospective exhibition at Toronto Reference Library.

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• Did soap making and packaging design for our annual holiday gifts. (Read all about it in our newsletter on side projects!).

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I also had the pleasure of working on some leadership and upskilling in 2025, including:

• The Forum Business Finance Essentials Program
• The Forum and Growclass’ AI strategy and operations Lab
• Attending the DesignX Design Leadership Summit in January

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• Being invited to join the Curated in Canada group of founders and business owners, including a pinch-me lunch with founders I’ve followed, admired, seen on stage and watched pitch on Dragon’s Den!! 

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Work with us in 2026!

We’re currently booking projects in late Q2 / early Q3 and would love to work with you or someone you know! As a small business, we live on referrals and they are so very much appreciated. 

If this post has gotten you excited about the potential for service design in your team, organization, or career this year, here are a few ways we might be able to collaborate.

• We’re always looking for great projects and clients! We can help with understanding your customer and their experiences and disappointments better, designing, launching, and piloting new services or non-profit programs, or solving your gnarliest customer experience challenges (think - biggest call center drivers, inefficient operations, areas with low CSAT). 
• Stay updated: Sign up for the Ask a Service Designer newsletter! 
• Invite us to speak on your podcast or at your conference, or train your team - we’d love to share our expertise and experience with your audience. 

Wishing you all a wonderful 2026!

As always, a huge thank you to all of our wonderful clients and collaborators. It’s an honor to serve you and work with you! Special shout out to collaborators Studio We, October Systems, Workomics, and All In, and a big thank you to the wonderful folks who support us on Ops, Finance and Legal. And finally, to everyone who reads and shares the newsletter, shows up at events and workshops, buys our courses and Pebble Talk deck, comments and emails us, all our hugs and gratitude!