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Consciously® Earns Two Merit Awards in Indie Agency News Top 40: Design

On May 7, 2025, the New York branding agency Consciously announced that it had won a 2025 Indie Agency News design award for its Trust Pillars™ framework. The official results are more specific. Consciously received two Awards of Merit in the first Top 40: Design, one for the trust framework and one for a brand identity for the sushi supplier Culimer USA. Neither entry placed in the ranked Top 40. Here is how the show works, what Consciously entered, and what a Merit means.

How the Top 40: Design works

Indie Agency News is a membership platform for independent agencies, run by former editors at publications such as Adweek and The Drum. It opened entries for its first Top 40: Design on January 14, 2025. There were no categories: any design work by an independent agency, shown publicly between 2023 and 2025, was eligible. Agencies could enter up to six times, at $159 to $219 per entry.

Finalists were scheduled to be named on April 7, with the Top 40 revealed on livestreams from April 21 and the top three announced at events in the winners' home markets. Kate and Daniel Wadia, founders of Mrs&Mr, served as jury presidents. The rules state that every entry either makes the Top 40 or receives an Award of Merit.

The results were published on May 2, 2025. Brandenburg's rebrand of Keflavik Airport took first place, ahead of Vacation's work for ANIMAL and Odd Notion's for Pitch Black. Below the ranked list, the page names 41 Merit entries from 23 agencies. Consciously appears there twice.

What Consciously entered

The first entry, "Culimer identity", was made for Culimer USA, which the entry describes as a sushi ingredient distributor. The brief was to set the company apart from what the entry calls its "antiquated competitors", with applications across packaging, the company brand and content. The answer was hand-drawn art and a logo in which a small school of fish sits above the "i". Schessa Galbot led creative direction, with strategy by Rai-mon Barnes and Shannon Franklin.

The second entry, "Stakeholder trust pillars", lists its client as StrategicAlly. Its description reads: "Create a framework for businesses to understand the kinds of trust they can build their business on." Gabriel Merrit is credited with creative direction and Barnes with the framework and strategy.

Neither entry reports measurable results. The trust entry's results field describes "beautiful pillars that illustrate different dimensions of trust", and the Culimer entry describes the design itself rather than any business outcome.

What Consciously said

Consciously announced both awards in press releases posted on May 7, 2025. The framework release says the agency was "recognized as a Merit Winner" for "its Trust Pillars™ framework, a strategic tool that helps organizations build stakeholder trust from the inside out." It says the award honors the development of BrandTrustPillars.com, which it describes as a free public resource for founders, CMOs and values-aligned teams.

"We created the Trust Pillars to help businesses move past buzzwords and ground their brands in real, lived values," said Rai-mon Nemar Barnes, the agency's founder. A second release covered the Culimer work, spelling the client "Culimar".

It is worth being precise about what the releases do and do not show. Both use the word "Merit" in the text, but both headlines present the result as a "2025 Indie Agency News Design Award". The framework release also says the award celebrates the platform's "practical use across sectors including B Corps, nonprofits, and equity-driven businesses." The Indie Agency News results page lists the entries without comment, and neither public entry names a B Corp or nonprofit client. Those claims are the agency's own.

Who Consciously is

Consciously is based in New York, and its releases are datelined Brooklyn. B Lab's directory lists it as a certified B Corp since October 2020. Its B Lab profile names Rai-mon Nemar Barnes as founder and CEO and Shannon Franklin as COO, and describes a business and brand agency built around "Connecting Value to Values™" and its own Consciously Method™. In a separate release dated March 7, 2025, Consciously said it had been certified as a Minority Business Enterprise by the New York & New Jersey Minority Supplier Development Council.

What agencies can take from it

Say which tier you won. In a show where every entry is recognized, the tier carries the information. "Merit Winner" in the body of a release is accurate. A headline that drops the tier invites readers to assume more.
Put results in the entry. Both entries describe the work, not what it changed for the client. Juries, and anyone checking later, can only credit what is written down.
Keep names consistent. The same work appears as "Stakeholder trust pillars", "Trust Pillars™" and BrandTrustPillars.com, and the client as both Culimer and Culimar. Consistent names make a claim easy to verify.

Update: what happened next (October 2026)

This article was first published on May 28, 2025. Here is how the story has developed since then:

July 2025: Culimer USA was rebranded as OddiSea SuperFrozen, the seafood trade site Atuna reported on July 3. The New Jersey company said the change was made to "respond to growing US consumer concerns about the management of our oceans". The report did not name an agency.
January 2026: Indie Agency News rebuilt its awards for 2026 into two shows: Top 40: Classic, with 10 categories and livestream reveals on June 1 to 5, and Top 40: People, Agencies + Hall of Fame, with reveals in October 2026. Neither is a standalone design show. Classic's categories include Craft and Experience Design + Activation.
October 2026: BrandTrustPillars.com, the site named in Consciously's release, now presents the framework as "8 Brand Trust Drivers", and Consciously's website describes the firm as a "stakeholder trust agency". B Lab's directory still lists Consciously as a certified B Corp, with an overall B Impact score of 120.3, up from 112 in 2020.

The 2025 results page still lists both Consciously entries as Merit winners.

Sources

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