Latitude Gave Half Away. Then It Lost Almost Everything.

Three weeks is not much time in which to choose a business model. It is barely enough time to pick a name, find a lawyer and discover that everyone has an opinion about logos. But in 2009, three weeks after Krista and Jeremy Carroll came home from Haiti, they quit their jobs and started Latitude. The new company had a rule before it had much of a company: half of its profits would go to people who needed the money more than its owners did.

This sounds like the sort of detail normally added to an agency biography after the clients arrive. At Latitude, it came first. The Carrolls had delivered clean water and visited feeding programs in Haiti. They returned to New York, looked at their own young children and found the contrast intolerable. Jeremy knew commercial printing. Krista had been an elementary school teacher and had learned the production business by helping him. They moved back to Minnesota, lowered their expenses by living in her parents' basement and began selling creative work.

The bet was not that generosity would excuse ordinary advertising. It was that good work could finance generosity. Latitude grew from production into strategy, identity, campaigns, retail environments and live experiences. Foot Locker came early. Adidas followed and stayed for more than a decade. Other assignments arrived from brands including Puma, Trane, Ring, Reebok, Marmot and Twitch. By 2019, the agency said it had directed more than $6.5 million to nonprofit work in 26 countries.

The first thing to disappear

Then the physical world closed. Latitude's business was heavily exposed to the very things nobody could do in early 2020: gather at launches, browse elaborate stores, touch products, travel to events. Krista Carroll has said 90% of current and forecast revenue vanished in a single week. Layoffs followed. The first failure was not the agency's taste or its purpose. It was the delivery system.

The cost was suddenly personal. Giving away profit is comfortable to defend when there is profit. During layoffs, Carroll wondered whether she had given away too much while the company was healthy. If the mission endangered the people employed to carry it out, was the mission still responsible?

What changed her mind was not a dramatic rescue. Months later, she sat with the remaining leadership team and noticed what the panic had hidden: useful people, durable client relationships and a history of solving difficult briefs. The resources were smaller, but they had not disappeared. Latitude kept the 50% rule and changed what it sold.

“Generosity isn't a liability. It is a privilege.”Krista Carroll, founder and chair

The agency moved toward brand strategy and social-first work. When film crews could not assemble, it mailed iPhones to creators and asked them to record themselves. That improvisation became a broader capability: making culture-sized ideas fit the dimensions of a phone screen, then connecting social, paid, earned and physical channels around the same thought.

A coffee launch in dating-show clothing

The clearest proof of the new Latitude arrived in a Caribou Coffee cup. Caribou had introduced fruit shakers and energy drinks for younger customers. A conventional agency might have made a conventional beverage campaign: condensation on plastic, fruit suspended in midair, adjectives doing unpaid overtime. Latitude made a six-episode TikTok dating show.

Dream Date: A Sip at Love, hosted by comedian Hannah Berner, put Gen Z singles through blind dates involving truths, dares and brightly colored drinks. Influencers received kits. Paid, owned, shared and earned media pushed viewers toward stores. The advertising worked because it behaved like something its audience might choose to watch.

Latitude reports that 80% of views came from non-followers, the work produced more than 34,000 engagements, and ad recall rose 22.2% - twice TikTok's dining and quick-service benchmark. The new drinks exceeded sales expectations by 170%, which Caribou described as its most successful recent launch. This is the agency's offer in miniature: strategy, entertainment, creators, distribution and measurable commercial behavior, rather than a pile of disconnected deliverables.

The same idea, at wildly different sizes

Latitude's portfolio moves from tiny screens to rooms people can enter. When Lionel Messi joined Inter Miami, Adidas gave the agency two weeks to create a pop-up. Latitude built Fútopia, part boutique, part clubhouse and part museum. It used Miami colors, local art, a wall of soccer balls, a gaming station, a golden goat and seven pairs of cleats marking Messi's seven Ballon d'Or seasons. The work had to sell merchandise, flatter a global athlete, feel local and be photographed by fans - all at once.

That range explains where Latitude sits in the market. It is neither a narrow social shop nor an event fabricator with a strategy paragraph added to the proposal. It competes with independent creative agencies and large networks for brand systems, integrated campaigns, retail design, activation, PR and content production. Independence is practical positioning: fewer network incentives, more freedom to begin with the idea and assemble the channels it needs.

The customer is usually a marketing leader with a complicated launch, a dated brand or an audience that has learned to ignore advertising. The business model is conventional agency fees attached to an unconventional profit allocation. There is no public record of venture funding. Revenue comes from the work; the social impact comes after expenses, when profit exists.

What is actually copyable

The tempting lesson is to copy the percentage. That is also the least useful place to begin. Latitude's model works because the number is precise, the beneficiaries are legible and the commercial discipline comes first. A promise funded by profit cannot rescue weak work. It can, however, sharpen decisions: hire people who want the trade-off, court clients who see alignment as more than decoration, and report tangible outcomes rather than atmospheric virtue.

A smaller company can borrow the mechanism without borrowing the scale. Choose a fixed formula. Put it in the operating plan. Build a reserve before a crisis. Connect each profitable project to an outcome close enough for employees to understand. Latitude says that within weeks of completing client work, its people can see the ripples in meals, medical care, education or freedom from abuse. That shortens the psychological distance between a Tuesday revision and the reason for doing it well.

There are limits. The formula depends on healthy margins, leaders willing to protect it and customers who still choose the work on merit. It is a poor fit for a cash-starved startup that treats donations as borrowed runway, or for an agency using generosity to avoid measuring campaign performance. Latitude itself supplied the warning: when live experience represented almost the whole book of business, one external shock nearly removed the engine that funded the mission.

The company that emerged is smaller than its pre-pandemic peak, broader in capability and newly led. Allison Checco became CEO in December 2025; Carroll moved to chair. Checco has discussed expanding the workforce, building a stronger West Coast presence and moving into categories such as alcoholic beverages. Recent work spans Adidas' Formula One and World Cup retail programs, Target, Post Consumer Brands and the National Park Foundation.

Leadership transitions reveal which parts of a founder's story have become institutional. At Latitude, the test is unusually clean. The campaigns may change from shoes to coffee to HVAC systems. The format may move from a shop to a six-part show. But after 17 years, a collapse and more than $8.5 million directed to causes across over 30 countries, the odd little rule written before the company had much else remains. Half stays. Half goes.