20 best moments in pastel’s story so far
Celebrating 20 years. The story of pastel is not linear, and I don’t think it should be told that way. The most honest approach is to look at ourselves through the key moments that truly mattered. Some were visible, others quieter, but all of them shaped the agency as it is today.
by Dana Nae Popa, Owner & Managing Director pastel
- The courage to begin
An entrepreneurial business usually begins before you have all the answers. With instinct, with energy, and with a kind of courage that you often understand better only many years later.
We started writing the pastel story when I was in my final year of university, after a series of experiences in communication agencies. My approach to business was simple: to do things as I would do them for myself, and to build a place where I would genuinely enjoy spending a good part of my day.
That is how it began. With no guarantees, but with a lot of passion for the industry.
2. The choice to remain an independent agency
The fact that pastel is a Romanian, entrepreneurial, and independent agency has mattered enormously to us. Independence is not just a business positioning; it is a way of thinking, making decisions, and taking responsibility for the consequences of your own choices.
3. The years that built the foundation
The first years of the agency were defined by hard work, pace, and accelerated learning. I believe any healthy business goes through this stage, when you lay one brick after another, adjust the plan, tear down a wall or two and build it back up, without yet knowing exactly what the building will look like 20 years later, but always being guided by a strong set of values.
4. The moment when projects began to confirm the direction
There comes a point in the life of any agency when you no longer feel that you are simply trying, but that you are genuinely starting to build something solid. And not necessarily through the biggest projects, but through the ones that confirm your work is beginning to matter, that the projects you deliver are visible, and that the people you work with are willing to recommend you further.
5. The lesson that enthusiasm is not enough
Enthusiasm gets you started. But pastel did not reach maturity through enthusiasm alone; it made the shift towards discipline.
From “we do it” to “we do it better.” From “it works” to “state of the art.” From “we adapt” to “we anticipate every last detail.” And the list could go on.
6. Understanding that the industry is built between people
Communication, with all its definitions, specializations, and subfields, does not happen only in presentations and campaigns. It is also defined and refined through relationships between people: between colleagues, between client and agency, between partners who learn to trust one another. This was one of the important moments of maturity.
7. The decision to remain an integrated agency
As the market became increasingly specialized, pastel chose to maintain an integrated way of thinking. For us, it has been important to bring together strategy, consultancy, creative, PR, social media, and implementation, without losing sight of the bigger picture.
8. Brief = Where are we heading?
For us, briefs are not the only starting point for the solutions we build for our clients. We like to sit down with the client, go into the field, speak with the extended teams, and truly understand the business in greater depth.
Only then does the way you work change completely. You no longer deliver only answers to the points in the brief; you try, as much as possible, to bring direction and clarity where the client needs your expertise as an agency.
9. The strategic reset
There were stages when pastel had to take a very serious look at itself, assess where it stood, and structurally reset. These moments were navigated with clarity, through a careful analysis of our DNA and our long-term business vision.
10. The rebranding
In 2019, we built a new brand identity and introduced the slogan “The bright touch for your brand.” This repositioning was supported, first and foremost, by a transformation in the way we worked internally.
From that moment on, communication campaigns benefited from the simultaneous “touch” of the agency’s specialists, coming from different angles and areas of expertise, and beyond. For us, the rebranding was less about how we looked and more about who we were and how we wanted to work going forward.
11. The talented and good-hearted people who joined the team
The encounters with people who brought energy, vision, expertise, strategic and creative thinking, character, and who helped the business grow in a healthy and nuanced way, according to each of their specializations.
12. A culture that stayed true to itself
After 20 years, I find it important that, beyond all the changes, growth, repositioning, and moments of reset, there is something in pastel’s way of doing things that has remained recognizable. A certain attention to people, to details, to relationships, to the way work is done, and to the meaning we put into our projects.
I do not believe an organizational culture is preserved through statements, but through hundreds of small gestures, repeated consistently. Through the way you choose people, the way you handle difficult conversations, the standards you refuse to negotiate, and the way you treat a client, a colleague, a partner, or a project under pressure.
For me, the fact that this DNA has remained visible is one of the most important parts of the pastel story.
13. Decisions
In the beginning, you tend to say “yes” to many things, to make compromises, to fall in love with the promise of a partnership or with the large budgets behind it. Even though we went through turning points along the way, we chose to remain true to our business and human values and, at times, to take the less straightforward path.
14. pastel NGO
pastel Association did not emerge as an image accessory, nor as a project separate from the agency, later created out of a need to tick a social responsibility box. It emerged naturally, from an internal program that already existed in our culture: “No month without a good deed.”
In the beginning, it was a way for us to discipline ourselves not to leave doing good to chance, or only to the periods when we had the time, resources, or right context. We wanted to turn involvement into a habit, not an exception. Over time, we understood that this kind of consistency deserved more than isolated initiatives. It deserved a clear structure, a direction of its own, and the ability to build projects with real, longer-term impact.
This is how pastel Association was born: from a simple but very powerful belief that good does not need to be spectacular in order to matter; it needs to be constant, intentional, and done seriously.
I believe this was one of the important moments in the pastel story, because it showed very clearly that a business’s values can move beyond discourse and become real mechanisms for action. The association did not only change the way we get involved; it also changed the way we look at our role, as an agency, in the community.
15. Efectiv Podcast
The launch of Efectiv Podcast was, in a way, a very natural step. After many years in communication, you begin to feel the need to go beyond campaigns, beyond execution, and even beyond immediate results. You become more interested in the conversations worth opening, in the ideas and questions that do not fit into a brief.
Efectiv Podcast was born precisely from this need: to speak more deeply about the effect of good in communication and about how this industry can generate not only visibility, but also meaning, responsibility, and impact.
It was important for pastel because it marked another stage of maturity, one in which we no longer saw ourselves only as executors of good ideas, but also as active participants in a larger conversation about the role of communication in society.
16. Getting Closer to Education and New Generations
In an industry where there is a lot of talk about the lack of well-trained people, about burnout, and about the gap between young people’s expectations and the reality of agency life, I believe it is important to do more than simply observe the problem. It is important to enter into dialogue with the generations coming next and to contribute, concretely, to their development.
This is where our collaborations with universities came from, along with our academy-related projects and our constant interest in students, internship programs, and contexts in which young people can better understand what this profession looks like beyond the clichés.
For me, this effort has never been just an investment in a potential talent pipeline. It has been, and continues to be, a form of responsibility towards the industry.
17. EcoVadis and B Corp Certifications
In communication, it is very easy to speak beautifully about values. It may even be one of the professional temptations of the industry. But it is something else entirely to enter a process that requires you to prove how you operate, how you make decisions, how you treat your team, what relationship you have with the community, and how much coherence there is between what you say and what you do. This is where I believe the serious work begins.
For pastel, these validations meant maturity, but also responsibility. They confirmed certain directions, but they also confronted us with more precise, more uncomfortable, and therefore more useful questions.
I believe this is why they hold such an important place in our story: because they did not close a chapter, but opened a more demanding and more conscious one.
18. The clients who trusted us
An important place in the pastel story inevitably belongs to all the clients who trusted us from day one. No agency business is built on its own, nor only through the ambition of its team. It is also built through the people who give you the chance to work on their brands, to enter their business challenges, to look for solutions together and, sometimes, to grow at the same time.
For me, every important project was also a form of trust received. Sometimes that trust came naturally; other times, it had to be earned step by step, through seriousness, consistency, and results. But all these collaborations mattered. They shaped us, tested us, refined our way of working, and helped us better understand what kind of agency we wanted to become.
Looking back, pastel also means all the clients, partners, and projects built together, with patience, rigor, dialogue, and a lot of hard work. Without this trust, our story would have been incomplete.
19. Contribution to the industry
After 20 years, I believe an agency can no longer remain only within the boundaries of its own projects. At some point, you begin to understand that you also have a responsibility towards the industry you are part of towards its standards, towards the way work is done, towards the dialogue between agencies, clients, young professionals, and the organizations that can help change things for the better.
For pastel, becoming involved in broader industry conversations came naturally. Whether we speak about ethics, pitches, the client-agency relationship, education, or the future of communication, we felt it was important not to remain mere observers.
A healthier industry does not build itself. It is built by people and organizations that choose to take part, to name things clearly, and to contribute to where they have real experience.
20. The fact that, at 20, pastel Is still under construction
After two decades, we have more maturity, more discernment, and a much clearer understanding of what suits us and what we no longer want to do. At the same time, we still have the same kind of optimism that has always helped us see, even in more complicated periods, what is still worth building further.
I am glad that the business has not settled into complacency and that it does not operate on inertia. I am also glad that curiosity has remained alive: the desire to understand what is changing, to test, and to keep learning.