NEWS
The One Centre celebrates
25 years of creating the
brands of tomorrow
01.12
The One Centre celebrates 25 years of creating the brands of tomorrow.
To mark the start of our 25th anniversary, The One Centre hosted a glittering evening of fun and celebration last November. With a sparkling guest list of clients, team members, partners and friends from the last 25 years, we celebrated this milestone by continuing a beloved One Centre tradition: transforming our Sydney headquarters into a glamorous venue called CASINO ONE.
With prizes generously donated by our luxury and lifestyle brand clients, it was the perfect start to our silver jubilee year – an opportunity to look back on our journey since 1999 when The One Centre was founded by Group CEO John Ford and wife Monica. Their vision was to create one of the world’s great innovation companies – for brands.
“It’s humbling for The One Centre to turn 25. We started the business on the cusp of a new century with the ambition to create a company – not just an agency – that could partner with entrepreneurs and innovators to create new brands and bring them to life in everything,” he says.
Going all in on global ambitions
From day one, The One Centre has partnered with clients to create, position and scale disruptive brands shaping industries and culture worldwide. Based in Sydney but operating globally, we work with Australian businesses eyeing international markets and international ventures on global brand development.
“The One Centre has an incredible legacy of creating disruptive brands, so our 25th anniversary Casino ONE event was as much about celebrating their successes as our own. Now with the poker chips packed away, we’re focused on what comes next: investing in our team and capabilities so we can continue to build the brands of tomorrow,” says Katie Molloy, The One Centre’s Chief Operating Officer.
The next hand we’re playing
The global economy is entering a new wave of disruptive ventures, fuelled by the energy transition, emerging technologies, and social, cultural and geopolitical transformation. To help clients thrive and scale in this ‘innovation economy’, we are expanding in two ways: hiring exceptional young leaders with specialised skills and creating our own specialist ventures from the ground up, and investing in outstanding founder-led businesses ready to accelerate their opportunity and become part of something bigger.
All orbiting The One Centre, a global innovation company for brands.
Zephyr One has officially joined The One Centre Group’s growing constellation of specialist modern branding and marketing companies. It represents one of our first strategic investments in our long-term plan to build a boutique collection of specialist businesses that leverage the collective strength of The One Centre to grow and evolve.
Zephyr One is a modern growth marketing studio uniting three core capabilities — commercial and growth strategy, paid media and full-suite performance marketing, and high-impact, performance-led creative — to deliver clients a powerful, scalable engine for growth, powered by its proprietary System One model.
“At The One Centre, we think about how brands come to life across every touchpoint through world-class originality — from product design to customer experience to cultural presence. With multi-disciplinary capabilities across our constellation, we have the ideal skillsets for positioning, branding and growing new ventures that redefine their categories.” In 2026, The One Centre’s constellation will continue to grow with several new specialist ventures on the horizon.
“Our vision for the next 25 years is to build one of the world’s great brand creation and innovation companies: a place where entrepreneurs and innovators come to invent the future. A place to imagine everything,” says Ford.
