Most days at DISTINC, we eat lunch together. Sometimes we go out to a restaurant, but usually we gather around the long table in the back of the office, chatting with each other while we eat our tofu wraps or tom kha gai.

Seven stories up, DISTINC’s studio occupies the top floor of a hundred- year-old hotel in Old Town Pasadena. Back in the day, our penthouse served as the property’s greenhouse — a big, open, sun-filled space with windows all around. Some days as we eat, a family of crows perches on the fire escape outside, overlooking the city and watching us as we eat.

If you were to eavesdrop, you’d find us talking about our weekends, our families, life. But inevitably the conversation turns to work: about a new concept that’s come up recently or a project we’re working on or a branding campaign we’re thinking about proposing. The mood is casual. We argue, we brainstorm, we confer. We daydream and joke around.

We do this — eat lunch together, rather than heading downstairs in twos or threes or eating at our desks — because we’ve found it an effective way to collaborate; to exercise consensus-building as a regularly flexed muscle. Taking a communal lunch affords us the chance to think creatively outside the workday’s normal structure. It cultivates creativity in a relaxed mode.

It also reflects a larger set of ideas. Each member of our team hails from a different background — Belgian, German, Austrian, Chinese, Mexican, and various American milieux perspectives on design, creativity, and branding. We’re proud of this. We think it gives DISTINC a platform for unparalleled cross-pollination of ideas and approaches.

For our clients, it means things happen faster; ideas are better; breakthroughs and epiphanies and clarity come more quickly and with more nuance than they would if we sought uniformity in our approach, or observed the strict hierarchy of a traditional brand development studio.

We think of this as “four-hands piano”: the idea that working together to come up with creative solutions almost always results in better options than doing so individually ever could. A collective viewpoint creates a great opportunity to exponentially expand our possibilities. And we’ve found one of the easiest ways to achieve that is to step away from our desktops in the early afternoon and meet up at the long table, where we can eat our lunch and, like the crows, enjoy a broader perspective on things.