The Nest knows what to do when the garden party gets rained out

The garden party was losing an argument with the weather. In New Orleans, The Nest had planned an outdoor celebration for Solidaire Network’s staff retreat: low dining tables, sofas, room to spread out. Leigh Robbie Gaymon-Jones, the agency’s founder, kept watching the forecast. Then drizzle arrived. There was less than an hour before the guests.

According to the company’s account, the team shifted into covered spaces, emphasized cocktail tables and bar seating, and kept one sofa. The sprawling garden arrangement became a compact house party. The guests, the account says, never noticed the substitution. A different evening had been assembled around the same purpose.

That is a useful introduction to The Nest. Its vocabulary includes cultural strategy, collective imagination, and belonging. Its work includes finding somewhere dry to put people. The distance between those two kinds of language is where this Los Angeles company earns its keep.

A company built around the space between jobs

Gaymon-Jones founded The Nest in 2022, bringing a background in interdisciplinary art, facilitation, program direction, and community building. The company describes itself as Black, Queer, and Woman-owned. Its current core team spans brand strategy, event production, operations, project management, web design, and graphic design. These are complementary skills for a surprisingly common problem: an organization knows what it cares about but needs help turning that conviction into something people can use.

The Nest now presents its offer through event production, strategic facilitation, and a creative studio, Woven Studios. A nonprofit might need a staff retreat. A board might need a workable decision-making process. An artist might need a website that makes a complicated practice legible. The agency can join those conversations instead of making the client translate between separate suppliers.

Its market is the overlap between creative agencies, event producers, and organizational consultants. The distinction is a combination of services and a particular community focus: artists, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and social-impact organizations, with BIPOC and Queer creatives central to its identity. Buying all those skills together can reduce handoffs. Clients can also commission individual services.

Consider its work for the California BIPOC Agroecology Network. The Nest facilitated three workshops and discussions over two days for approximately 25 members at Paicines Ranch. The brief involved shared leadership and relationship building. Here, the deliverable was a process people could participate in. A visual identity alone could hardly have done that job.

The book party has a second act

In Oakland, the agency produced a celebration for Sharon Bridgforth’s bull-jean & dem/dey back at The Huey P. Newton Foundation. Guests heard readings, listened to Bridgforth in conversation with her daughter, Sonja Perryman, and could buy commemorative prints being screen printed on site. An altar space was curated by Amara Tabor Smith. The evening ended with dancing, including the Cupid Shuffle and the Electric Slide.

It is a revealing list. Each activity offered a different way into the work: listening, asking, remembering, taking something home, moving with other people. The Nest also designed the event assets. The invitation and the experience could therefore speak in the same voice.

The same combination appears at a different scale in Embodiment Project’s Get Free Festival. Woven Studios produced eight days across San Francisco and Oakland, including 20 street-dance technique classes, a performance showcase, two experimental battles, and a day party. It also developed and managed promotional social content and newsletters. Marketing and production were parts of a shared assignment.

For the television pilot Here She Comes, an existing brand kit became the starting point for a screening campaign. The Nest handled social strategy, budgets, vendor contracts, invitations, ticketing, and onsite coordination at the Saban Theater. The work followed the project from visual identity to an audience arriving at a door.

What the invoice buys

The published branding menu makes the commercial model unusually easy to inspect. Jump Start begins at $7,500 and pairs a basic identity with a one- or two-page website. Launch starts at $14,000; Amplify at $27,000. Those are advertised starting prices, with scope and add-ons affecting the final quote.

The entry package lists six meetings over six to eight weeks. Clients supply completed copy, photography, and website materials. That requirement matters: an organization still debating its purpose or waiting for everyone’s biography has preparation to do before a tidy website scope becomes a tidy project. These packages assume Squarespace; other platforms may increase the price.

For a concrete design example, look at Xi’im Ek Balam. Woven Studios created colors and logos for the arts, culture, and liberation organization’s public introduction. It also advised on the launch of the Black Jaguar School for Liberation and made a one-page explanation for prospective funders and participants. The useful artifact was something another person could read, understand, and pass along.

A social account you can take back

The Nest’s work for photographer Stevie Gaymon offers another way to buy help. Woven Studios audited Gaymon Studios’ social presence, developed a strategy and visual guide, and built a content calendar. It then managed the account for a year before returning it to Gaymon with a plan for what came next.

That sequence is worth copying: diagnose, create tools, practice, hand over. It makes the client’s eventual ability to operate part of the assignment. The studio’s current social media kits similarly offer content and planning resources for internal teams. This arrangement makes sense when someone inside the organization can maintain the work. Templates need an owner as surely as an event needs a producer.

“Loved that we pivoted to accommodate the rain!”

Rajasvini Bhansali, Solidaire Network
Client testimonial published by The Nest

New Orleans supplies the equivalent lesson for events. Community Solstice founder Shana Turner helped arrange local activities and became the lead facilitator for staff workshops. Alex Burzynski supported shopping, staffing, and the closing party. The Nest’s account describes local knowledge becoming real responsibility. For an organizer borrowing the approach, that is the point to copy: involve people who know the place early enough to shape the plan.

A weather backup also needs usable space and a team empowered to rearrange it. The New Orleans result depended on both. An outdoor-only venue would require a different contingency. The lesson travels; the exact seating plan does not.

Who gets to practice belonging

Alongside client services, The Nest runs Gatherings, its public-program umbrella. It includes Foundations for entrepreneur development, Gather Round meals, and Dandy Scouts, a queer-led preparedness skillshare. The last of these is an especially memorable pairing: practical survival skills and an invitation to learn together. Next River fiscally sponsors the public programs.

Flight Lab extends that ambition toward business support. Its page describes a reciprocal incubator for BIPOC, Queer, and Trans-led businesses, with design advice, event consultation, and peer connections. The program is described as being researched, developed, and piloted in Los Angeles. It belongs in the account of what The Nest is trying to build, with that stage clearly attached.

The agency has also applied its branding process to itself. An internal exercise helped articulate four values: connection, craft, collaboration, and care. Those words become interesting when attached to a decision. Hire the local facilitator. Make the program understandable on one page. Give the photographer his account back. Move the sofa before the guests arrive.

For a prospective client, the useful question is where their own idea gets stuck: in language, in coordination, or in bringing people together. The Nest has built a business around working through those problems. Sometimes the answer is a brand framework. Sometimes it is a room where the conversation can finally happen.