Vikings at the Gates – Minnesota Business magazine

The September issue of Minnesota Business magazine featured a pleasant summary of our company by writer Elizabeth Millard. Here’s the text from the article (below), and the link.

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Vikings at the Gates

Hello Viking may boast agency experience, but the firm is a whole new breed of explorer.

By:  Elizabeth Millard

Hello Viking can be compared to a traditional agency in the same way that the actual Vikings had a bit in common with tourists—sure, both appreciate travel, but their mode of transport and ways of exploration certainly differ.

Taking its cue (and its name) from the rough-and-tumble adventurers, the agency isn’t into the whole “sacking and pillaging” aspect of Viking life, but instead the more positive aspects, like finding new trade routes and developing inventive strategies. The result is a firm that buzzes with creativity and innovation.

In its open office spaces above Sebastian Joe’s in Uptown, the young team members of Hello Viking sometimes write ideas on a whiteboard so furiously that founders Jennifer Iwanicki and Tim Brunelle need to snap photos of the results before they get wiped away to make room for more insights. A rack of comic books stands at the ready for graphic art inspiration, and Rock Band is tucked into the corner of a space used for photo shoots. A pair of Viking-style helmets, complete with horns, aren’t just ornamental: employees who are having conflicts with each other must wear the helmets while they’re discussing the contentious issue.

“You really can’t be serious while wearing a Viking helmet,” says Brunelle. “You last about two seconds and then you just feel ridiculous. So, naturally, everyone loves the idea.”

For the employees and the firm’s husband-and-wife founders, that approach to inter-office static is indicative of the overall mission, which, from where I sit, appears to be: be fresh, be focused, be collaborative. Although that could be the directive for any creative agency, Hello Viking goes far beyond traditional agency offerings. Definitely, it can whip up advertising, branding and marketing—Iwanicki and Brunelle have deep industry background at firms like Arnold Worldwide and Carmichael Lynch—but team members can also get involved with pricing structures, evaluate business operations, or change customer service approaches.

“Agencies typically haven’t been allowed to touch areas like pricing or distribution, they’ve always worked with marketing,” says Iwanicki. “But what good is marketing if the product being sold doesn’t have growth potential or isn’t reaching customers as efficiently as possible? We’re excited when we can go to operations meetings and get to the root level of a company. We love talking to engineers.”

By its very definition, marketing can be better integrated into an enterprise’s operations, the pair believe, and they’re happy to lead the way. The approach goes beyond a hybrid strategy and into new territory, where an agency can not just participate into conversations about selling but also be intimately involved in product development, warehousing systems, database management and even employee recruiting programs. At its best, a business should have all its pieces working together, so Iwanicki and Brunelle feel it’s only logical to have a firm that can contribute ideas at every level.

That might sound like it takes an awful lot of Vikings for every client voyage, but the firm’s actually quite lean. With just 12 employees, the company is able to stay nimble, the founders believe, and when a client hires Hello Viking, it gets the expertise of the whole team. “It’s really a ‘more with less’ approach,” says Iwanicki. “Also, it opens us up to collaborate in a way that couldn’t happen in East Coast agencies, which tend to be very competitive.”

Maybe the Vikings weren’t big on collaboration, but Hello Viking excels when it comes to teaming up with fellow innovators. The firm works with two marketing consortiums and calls in freelance genius when needed. That means a client might not get a team of a baker’s dozen, but one that’s really double that size.

“It’s all about openness, freshness and connection,” says Brunelle. “It really goes back to the explorer metaphor: If you’re heading out to unfamiliar lands, you don’t necessarily need deep expertise in every culture, but you should have some fluency and definitely a healthy sense of curiosity.”

By drawing on the skills of a multi-talented team, augmenting it with outside resources and diving into all aspects of business operations, Hello Viking’s team are the cool explorers to watch, the ones who not only come up with the most sparkling ideas but also find ways to turn them into reality. Now, that’s adventure travel.