Twenty-plus years ago, a football promotion for Black & Decker put Carolyn Walker in a room she had no business being in.
An executive on that project sat on a foundation board alongside someone from Logitech. The Logitech exec saw the work, wanted the same thing and made an introduction.
That introduction turned StayGold — then known as Response — and Logitech’s Irma Sandoval into a partnership still running more than 20 years later. It also kicks off The 20-Year Client, a show about the relationships that outlast org charts, budget cycles and review consultants.
Agency-client relationships are supposed to be disposable now — reviewed, rebid, rotated on a schedule. This one has outlasted most of the people who would have run the review.
How many projects in that span? “Thousands,” says Walker, who went back and counted.
Love at first webcam
Sandoval doesn’t remember much about 20 years ago. She remembers this.
She was running the in-store experience for Logitech then — displays, trade marketing, an amount of work she describes as overwhelming. What she needed was someone who could tell a story about a webcam.
Not the specs. The thing a webcam did in 2004, which was let a person watch somebody’s face from the other side of the planet. “They’re emotional,” explains Sandoval. “You can talk to someone across the globe.”
Plenty of shops could build the display. Sandoval wanted the one that understood the sentence underneath it.
The brief came back and Response had gotten it.
“She’s emotional like me. She’s a storyteller. Who does that 20 years ago? That was non-existent,” Sandoval recalls. “That’s what love at first sight looked like for me.”
The stable
What came next was less romantic. Sandoval kept a roster of agencies and put them against each other, assignment by assignment, for two decades running. Nobody got a comfortable seat.
Walker didn’t love it. Having spent time on the client side herself, she also understood it. “That fact alone kept us on our toes,” notes Walker. “We felt like we were constantly competing to win.”
Plenty of agencies would read that as a red flag and start quietly looking elsewhere. Walker read it as a permanent audition — uncomfortable, and far better for the work than the alternative.
It also produced the most useful reframe in the show. Twenty years isn’t an achievement, in her telling. It’s arithmetic — “the outcome of repeatedly earning that next assignment and next assignment and next assignment.”
When it’s terrible
Trust is the word both of them reach for, and Walker is the one who does the work of defining it. Three parts, none of them especially warm.
The first is candor, running in both directions. “We can tell each other when it’s terrible or when it’s great, or we miss the mark, without triggering this defensiveness,” she explains. “It’s more of a partnership where we’re like, okay, let’s take it in and we’ll retool, we’ll do it differently.”
Most relationships treat candor as a risk to be managed, something to route through an account director and soften on the way. Here it runs straight, and it’s the thing that keeps the work honest.
The second is perspective. Bosses change, stakeholders rotate, budgets shrink and priorities get rewritten — and somebody has to remember what the brand already learned about its customers. For 20 years, that somebody has been the agency.
The third is the least glamorous and probably the load-bearing one. They don’t leave.
“Things get hard, conversations get tough, priorities shift. Things are nuts in terms of timeline. We are always there,” says Walker. “I’m taking her call every time.”
The creative gap
Ask Sandoval what separated one agency from the rest and she doesn’t hedge: creativity, curiosity and a refusal to get comfortable.
The rest of the roster was good, she’s careful to say. Some pricier, some cheaper, all capable, each bringing something different to the table. “There’s always someone faster, smarter, cheaper,” she adds — and then she’d hand the work back to the same shop, because “no one came close to that level of creativity.”
Her tell is what she worries about in a meeting, and it isn’t the substrate. “You’re going to build a display and people are worried about so many different things. I’m worried about stopping power,” Sandoval says. “I’m worried about the story on it. I’m worried about how it’s going to connect with people. Everyone’s getting caught up on the logistics and the materials.”
Walker’s version of the same standard is less flattering to herself. StayGold lost assignments over those 20 years, and when it lost, it lost for one reason.
“When we lost, it came down to creativity,” she admits. “The stuff she gave to other agencies was awesome work, and I understand why she selected them.”
Marketers get graded on efficiency, which makes choosing the more expensive idea from the shop that isn’t the fastest a small act of professional risk, every time. Sandoval kept choosing it anyway, and has two decades of work to point at.
A billion and a half to almost 5
Logitech was a $1.5 billion company when this started. It’s closing in on $5 billion now, spanning gaming, headphones, Bluetooth speakers, webcams and whatever mouse is under your hand right now — a portfolio that grew in every direction without the center moving.
That’s Walker’s read on why it held. “The brands that stay gold — that stay true to who they are at the core — are the ones that endure,” she says. Logitech makes a mouse not because a mouse is a functional object, but because it lets somebody create and produce and move faster.
Plenty of brands grow by adding things. The harder trick, and the one Logitech has managed, is adding without losing the plot.
Sandoval credits the research, the closeness to the consumer and a line her CEO repeats: this brand is part of your everyday life. Same shelf as her Starbucks and her Levi’s.
“It sounds so simple and yet so hard,” she notes.
Chemistry last is backwards
Asked for one piece of advice, Walker wants clients to open the door earlier. “Agencies do better work when they’re invited into the thinking before the answers have already been decided,” she says. Clients don’t need every answer. They need to be clear about where they’re trying to get to.
Sandoval refused the question outright, which turned out to be the better answer. “I don’t think there’s one piece of advice,” she says. “It’s either you’re clicking or you’re not, and let’s not waste time.”
Both of them landed on chemistry — which in most agency reviews is the thing that gets scheduled after procurement, if it gets scheduled at all.
The 20-year roadmap
None of this was luck. Pulled apart, two decades look like a short list of behaviors both sides kept repeating.
What the client did:
- Kept a real roster and made every assignment competitive, permanently
- Judged on creative, not on who was faster or cheaper
- Said the standard out loud — stopping power, the story, the connection — so briefs had something to aim at
- Gave candid feedback and took it back without anyone getting defensive
- Moved on fast when a relationship wasn’t clicking, instead of managing it for years
What the agency did:
- Fell for the brand, not the account, and kept that visible in the work
- Handled the business like its own, on the unglamorous projects too
- Stayed through budget cuts, shifting priorities and timelines that went sideways
- Carried the institutional memory as bosses, stakeholders and org charts changed
- Lost honestly, and named creative as the reason when creative was the reason
Nothing on either list requires scale, a holding company or a master services agreement. It requires both parties deciding the work matters more than the comfort.
So, fill in the blank. The most important thing in a 20-year client relationship is what?
Capability plus likability, Walker says. Both, or neither counts.
Sandoval needs one word.
“Trust. If I can trust you to get the work done, if I can trust you to level up, if I can trust you to have the hard conversation, if I can trust you to call me on a Saturday and we get it done,” she says. “I trust StayGold implicitly. It feels so good.”
It isn’t a complicated answer. It is a hard one to earn twice a year, every year, for 20 years — and the reason there’s a 21st already underway.
Learn more
StayGold
Carolyn Walker LinkedIn
Irma Sandoval LinkedIn
StayGold LinkedIn
StayGold Instagram
StayGold YouTube
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
