Brooklyn, 2000.

Big Spaceship is a creative agency from Brooklyn, New York. Adweek, introducing a video series on the borough’s agencies on 29 April 2011 and quoting Jotham Sederstrom’s cover story from its issue of 18–24 April 2011, said that Michael Lebowitz founded the company in 2000, when its whole staff of two could fit into a bedroom of his home in Boerum Hill.

The name was the point of that story. Adweek said that christening so small a company “Big Spaceship” might have been aspirational. The Bridge, a Brooklyn business news site, made the same observation in a podcast profile by Kim Thornton recorded in September 2017: in 2000, it said, the name was genuinely ironic. Lebowitz told the site that digital work at the time was a silo, and a small one, and that agencies like his were fighting for crumbs off the table.

The agency has used the space imagery in its own writing. On its website in October 2026 the footer line above its contact addresses read “Ready for launch”, and its trade announcements in January 2026 described the company as built for exploration.

Lebowitz described the culture he wanted in the same 2017 interview. He said he had always tried to make a workplace that was about more than a job, where people could collaborate and be themselves, and he called Big Spaceship “a company that is a canvas for the people”. He also said he preferred to describe the business as “a modern agency”, because, as he put it, people no longer have a digital life and a real-world life, just their lives.

Big Spaceship’s clients appear across the reports cited here. The Bridge named JetBlue, Samsung and YouTube in 2017. ClickZ reported on 1 February 2011 that Wrigley had picked Big Spaceship in 2009, alongside Firstborn and EVB, as digital agencies for its brands.

From Boerum Hill to Dumbo, and into MSQ.

The agency soon moved out of the bedroom. By the time of Adweek’s 2011 series it was described as Dumbo-based, in the waterfront district beneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. Lebowitz told The Bridge in 2017 that when the company moved to Dumbo the area was undiscovered and fairly run down, and that by then it was hard to walk anywhere there without passing a digital business or an agency. He said he was proud of being a Brooklyn business. Adweek had grouped Big Spaceship in 2011 with a set of agencies it called New York City’s new brand of agency, in a series it named after the F train that links Brooklyn and Manhattan.

At some point the agency shortened its name to SPCSHP, a vowelless version of the second word. It was under that name that the agency changed hands. Decision Marketing, a UK trade site, reported on 3 October 2024 that the data- and technology-led marketing group MSQ had acquired the New York creative agency SPCSHP, which it said was previously known as Big Spaceship. The report said MSQ’s international investment strategy was backed by the private-equity groups One Equity Partners and LDC.

The founder stayed in place. Decision Marketing said that Michael Lebowitz, by then founder and chairman, and the chief executive Ranae Heuer would continue to lead SPCSHP as part of MSQ’s US team, working with MSQ’s North America president Aaron Lang. Lebowitz said the agency represented the bulk of his professional life, and that MSQ had emerged as the partner of choice when the agency began looking for one the previous year. The report listed Dairy Queen, JPMorgan Chase, Starbucks, Google, PepsiCo and Early Warning Services among the agency’s clients. MSQ has owned the agency since 2024.

MSQ’s US group by then also included the creative and CRM agency The Gate, the B2B media agency Stein IAS and the branding and design agency Elmwood, along with the newer additions Smarts, Brave Spark, MMT and Walk-In Media, according to the same report. In October 2026 the agency’s website described it as Big Spaceship, an MSQ company.

Two words, then six letters, then two words again.

Digital and interactive studios rarely have a product on a shelf, so the name and the website carry the identity work. Many of the names are made up rather than descriptive: a word with a numeral attached, a film-industry term borrowed and hyphenated, a phrase that hints at a way of working. The same name can also be written several ways over the years. Trade magazines may print it in lower case while the studio’s own site sets it in capitals, and a hyphen or a numeral can become a distinctive part of the mark.

The studio website is usually the main brand surface. It works as a portfolio, with full-screen video and case studies in front and the typography kept plain. Office cities are often written as short codes along the top of the page, and project credits, director rosters and archives are treated as part of the brand, because they show who made what and when.

These identities also change shape as the business changes. Studios open and close offices, split a film arm from an agency, or fold their work into new ventures under the original name. When reading them, look at how the name is set across the website, the credits and the trade press, how the studio lists its cities, and what it keeps from earlier eras in its archive.

A name taken apart and put back, dated.

The SPCSHP name did not last. The Stable, an Australian creative-industry site, reported on 22 January 2026 that the New York agency would return to its original name, Big Spaceship. It quoted the chief executive Taryn Crouthers: “People just kept calling us Big Spaceship anyway.” She said that everyone, inside and outside the company, had kept using the full name, and that after A/B testing the agency had found people preferred knowing how to pronounce a name.

The Stable gave a second reason. As part of MSQ’s global creative network, it said, Big Spaceship needed a name that could translate across languages and markets, and the six-consonant version did not. It reported that one client had been writing “Big Spaceship” in emails for two years in the hope that the name would change back. The same announcement named Steve Street as chief creative officer, and said the agency was founded by Lebowitz.

Transform, the London-based magazine on rebranding, covered the change on 6 February 2026 in a piece by Jenna Sents. It said the agency had found the vowelless name hard to pronounce and to understand, especially across languages and markets, and that it had reverted to the original. Transform listed the NFL, Starbucks and Chase among its clients. The agency’s own news page in October 2026 carried the headline “Spcshp, pining for its lost vowels, returns to the name Big Spaceship”, alongside an item about the appointment of a new chief executive.

The restored name is the one Adweek wrote about in 2011, when the agency was a Dumbo business and the name was read as a joke about its size. The Stable said in January 2026 that the return reflected changes inside the agency as well, as it and its parent company built new ways of working.

For a design guide, Big Spaceship shows how a name chosen as a joke can outlast a change of owner and a change of spelling. Compare Huge, another Brooklyn agency with an outsized name, and Ueno, a digital studio in this collection. For this guide we use launch amber, orbit navy and deep space with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Big Spaceship’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.