By Kirsty Leighton MBE, Founder and Group CEO
For a few weeks this summer, America threw its doors open and the whole world walked in.
The World Cup turned American cities into a meeting place for every nation on earth. Flags from countries you would struggle to place on a map, songs in a hundred languages, strangers in the street hugging over a game. Yesterday it reached its finish, and congratulations to Spain, worthy winners. But the picture that stayed with me was not the final. It was the welcome. A country making room for everyone who turned up ready to compete.
That is the America I love doing business in.
Milk & Honey has been in the United States for five years now, part of a business started in London almost ten years ago. And like a lot of the teams that arrived this summer, we are here on our own terms.
A while ago we sold the shares in our original New York entity. The unusual part is what came next: we kept the business. The brand, the name, the intellectual property, all of it stayed with us. Then we rebuilt as a Public Benefit Corporation, a structure that answers to our values as much as our numbers. We did not want big for the sake of big. We wanted ours. Independent, employee-owned, and free to play our own game.
It seems to be working. Inc named us to its 2026 Top 500 Female Founders. PRovoke Media has called us a Best Agency to Work for four years running. We have picked up a run of environmental and people-first honours, and we now hold global agency of record mandates that not long ago would have felt a long way off. Not a trophy cabinet. A way of working.
What this summer reminded me is that America rewards exactly that. It is a proper melting pot, where the culture can change from one block to the next, where ambition is welcome and reinvention is forgiven, and where there is always room for anyone willing to bring their best.
So we head into the second half of the year the way this summer began. Doors open, sleeves rolled up, glad to be in the game.
If you are building something in America and want a partner who does good business and says so plainly, come and find us. I would love to hear what you are working on.
