Its that time of year again when we have to say Penblwydd hapus to ourselves and divulge our age, but maybe you can guess how old we are? We would also like to thank all our customers, colleagues and friends over the last ...... years!

Over the last few months we have been putting together a new website ready for today's public announcement of Wales' top 50 fastest growing companies. The Fastgrowth 50 recognises and awards those companies that show exceptional growth sustained over a period of time and after thirteen years of identifying the fastest growing firms in Wales, the unique initiative is firmly established as the list of business success that entrepreneurs across Wales aspire to.

Organiser Professor Dylan Jones Evans explains: "Every year, it is a constant remainder of the vast entrepreneurial potential that exists within the Welsh business sector, with growth performance by businesses that is as good as any to be found across the regions of the UK."

Hoffi's role was to inject life into the online presence of the Fastgrowth 50. Working closely with Dylan we developed a prominent chart based focus to the site, which showcases this years winners and features Avonwen Landry as Wales' number one fastest growing company for 2011. Additional features such as news publishing and profile management will come on board (for those on the list) over the coming weeks, allowing this year's fifty to take ownership of their listings, whilst being able to use the website for promotion throughout the year.

This years event was supported by Capita Law, Santander, Media Wales, Logicalis, Venture Wales, University of Wales, Sinclair Group and University of Wales, Newport.

On the 22nd of June we'll be joining Design Wales at a business breakfast held by the Caerphilly Business Forum. The event will be an opportunity for businesses to learn about the programme of service design support that's available from Design Wales.

Hoffi have been invited to talk about how we work with business using service design tools and design thinking to develop strategies that grow brands; adding value to your business through design.

To book your place please visit the following link and register here http://servicedesignwales.eventbrite.com/

That was always going to be the problem with a conference like Intersection. Tom Hulme (Design Director from IDEO), Josephine Green formally of Phillips, David McCandlees of Ted fame and John Thackara to name but a few. Were all present to for the the two day event which was centred around Creativity and Business and was particularly looking at the sustainable angle of business and ways in which this could be improved for the future. The event itself was at the Eden Project which is the first time I have been to the project so it was great to kill two birds with one stone.

Part of the cornwall design season and also looked at the second DOTT event (the first one being back in 2007 in the North East of England). The event was a pretty standard format with speakers talking for around 30 minutes about projects they have been involved in, or thoughts and beliefs they are thinking about. I think for me the nature of the talks was interesting on a number of levels. the main reason was a lot of people said the same thing again and again. Processes and thoughts were described that kept on popping up.

The main themes for me were as follows, I will be adding more content in the following blog posts:

- Ask the right question
- Gaming
- Collaboration V's Competition??
- Purpose
- Blended Reality
- GDP V's ISEW
- Note of caution to designers

For now I will leave you with the above image that shows what we might be doing if we really do destroy this planet.

Following the success of our last two seminars, which covered branding and online strategies, we have been working on the arrangements for our third seminar taking place Thursday 14th of April, at Enterprise House, Cardiff Bay. In this seminar you will discover why your brand is the most valuable part of your business, and why a good brand can benefit you.

We will be there from 8:30am where you will be able to get a coffee and a little breakfast, before we start at 9:00am. The seminar will run through some examples of what branding is and what it is not. Looking at why having good branding is valuable for your business and what the key ingredients of a good brand is. We will be particularly concentrating on how to use your brand to position itself in the marketplace. This will take us up to 12pm, when there will be around an hour or so for networking (We will be around afterwards should any of you wish to chat about any particular issues you have.)

Places are limited, so book early to avoid disappointment. For your place at the seminar please email elin.williams@hoffi.com quoting reference: brandemail

Doesn't time fly when you are having fun... Only last month we celebrated our fifth birthday, which was a fantastic milestone, and is for any business. To celebrate we did a number of things, including the launch of our lovely new website along with dispatching a number of packages to our friends and customers. Hopefully some of you planted the gift inside the package and are now experiencing growth and fruition ready for today's St. David's Day celebrations.

We would love to see photographs please send them to shwmai@hoffi.com or tweet them @brandhoffi