In 2013 I opened a design & innovation company that was focused on change. Why was it called 9INE? Because it’s the mathematical number of change and ‘number nines’ in world football are game changers. There are nine muses in greek mythos, it’s the number of buddhist monks that oversee sacred rituals and there are nine forms of chinese dragons. At 9INE, we saw eras in nine years. Sometimes we dressed to the nines and we certainly knew what a stitch in time saved us. Although there are nine rings of dante’s hell and nine tolkien wringwraiths, there are also nine choirs of christian angels and nine in the fellowship, so really it could either way. They say there are nine craft at area 51 but who the hell knows. Tangentially, we felt a bit bad for the ninth planet having been downsized and all, but on the scale of clouds, number nine is cumulonimbus, the highest a cloud can go. Mathematically, any product of nine when reduced to single digit equals nine and that’s auspicious. In Tarot, the ninth card of the major arcana is the hermit, a card all about enlightenment; something only attainable through massive shift, a good word for change. Ultimately, 9INE represented the reframing we did everyday. It was the mcguffin in our narrative. The soy milk in our coffee. The big in our data. We’re fans of nine. What else can we say?