At the corner of North End Avenue and Warren Street in New York, two former college soccer players sat at a kitchen table and named a company after the view outside. Nick Van Sicklen and Matt Carroll had no grand headquarters, no inherited agency and, by Van Sicklen’s later account, not all the answers. They did have conviction, media experience and the useful intimacy of people who had already learned how the other moved.
North & Warren began there in 2016. The address was literal; the ambition was less modest. Van Sicklen had spent years learning how digital media, branded content and sales fit together. He and Carroll believed those pieces could be arranged more intelligently for luxury brands - with audience data guiding the work instead of arriving afterward as a decorative chart.
A decade later, the kitchen-table company has become something much larger. North & Warren combined with an experiential agency, added a strategic communications firm, unified the businesses under the Interluxe Group name and bought a performance marketing shop. Van Sicklen now leads the resulting company as founder and CEO. By June 2026, it counted more than 200 people across North America and Europe.
That is the corporate chronology. The more revealing story starts years before the kitchen table, on a field in Madison, Wisconsin, where Van Sicklen discovered that individual statistics are agreeable but teammates are what endure.
Before the boardroom, three brothers and every sport
Van Sicklen grew up in Madison between an older brother and a younger one. The household treated specialization with suspicion. The brothers played hockey, tennis, soccer and whatever else was available. The variety mattered. Hockey sharpened pace and balance; soccer eventually claimed him. At Madison West High School he still played both, finishing his senior hockey season as the team’s second-leading scorer while making a louder mark on grass.
As a junior defensive midfielder, he scored 18 goals and made 16 assists. The following year he produced 39 goals and 20 assists for a conference-winning team and earned Midwest All-America recognition. College recruiters offered alternatives, but every campus visit suffered the same comparison. Madison was home, and the University of Wisconsin was the standard in his head. He stayed.
He contributed immediately as a freshman, then earned All-Big Ten honors in each of his final three seasons. Wisconsin named him its offensive MVP in those same three years. The grand afternoon came in 2004 against Penn State: three goals, one assist and seven points in a 4-3 win. At the end of his college career, his 76 points placed him fifth on Wisconsin’s all-time scoring list.
Two decades later, Van Sicklen’s favorite statistic was social. Three Badger soccer players stood in his wedding party. Wins decay into archive pages; friendships keep answering the phone.
The brief, useful life of a professional
Professional soccer was not the inevitable plan. Van Sicklen had studied Legal Studies and once imagined law school more readily than a pro contract. A trial with clubs in Germany did not produce one. Then D.C. United selected him 19th overall in the 2005 MLS SuperDraft. He became the sixth Wisconsin player drafted into the league and made the defending champion’s 18-man roster.
His American professional record was small enough to invite disproportionate lessons. He started twice for United in the CONCACAF Champions’ Cup, including a 2-1 win over Jamaica’s Harbor View. He did not appear in a league match. Before the 2006 season, United did not offer him another contract.
Van Sicklen moved on to Canterbury United in New Zealand. The football was different, but the culture around it made the deeper impression. Here the game was not an emerging entertainment product. It was threaded into ordinary life. He played a season, took in that devotion and retired in 2007.
“Your identity changes overnight. However, starting and building a company has helped bring back the special parts of being on a team.”Nick Van Sicklen, reflecting on life after professional sport
Retirement at 24 is an odd promotion. The body is young; the identity is suddenly past tense. The corporate 9-to-5 felt abrupt to him. What sport had supplied without announcement - rhythm, a shared aim, candid feedback, the daily presence of a team - now had to be rebuilt deliberately.
Learning to sell the story without losing the reader
Van Sicklen entered digital sales when publishers were learning, often noisily, that a website was not a magazine with a glowing screen. He worked at the lifestyle ad network Halogen and became a vice president at Snooth Media, a wine-focused startup. In 2012, American Express Publishing promoted him to executive digital director for FoodandWine.com and TravelandLeisure.com.
Those were instructive rooms. Food, wine and travel attract advertisers because desire is close to the surface. They also punish clumsy selling. The reader arrived for somewhere to go, something to taste or a life briefly imagined. A commercial program had to respect that mood.
At Time Inc., Van Sicklen rose to digital vice president, working across travel, finance, home, sports and fashion. Scale changed the numbers, not the central puzzle: how does a publisher serve a reader, give a brand something useful and still know whether the work performed?
His answer became increasingly empirical. When he helped launch Full-Time Travel in 2018, the brand distributed editorial through social channels and email instead of treating its own homepage as a sacred destination. First-party audience signals helped determine what to make. Inspiration belonged on Instagram; useful depth could live in the inbox. The content followed people rather than demanding that people follow an old publishing map.
The old teammate returns to the lineup
Carroll had played at Wisconsin, too. By the time he and Van Sicklen started North & Warren, each had accumulated a different set of media muscles. Their partnership joined familiarity with complementary experience. It also restored a structure Van Sicklen missed: a small group, a score worth keeping and the knowledge that somebody else’s run can create your opening.
The company built media and marketing programs for affluent audiences. It developed content, distribution and direct sales, then gathered lifestyle media properties into its orbit. Growth brought recognition on the Inc. 5000 in 2021 and 2022. Van Sicklen once described an outside accounting partner as helping the business grow tenfold, from startup to more than 25 employees. The number was already obsolete by the time the next chapter arrived.
In February 2025, North & Warren acquired the experiential agency Interluxe Group with backing from Mountaingate Capital. The combination put proprietary audience data, media and digital marketing beside physical activations. Seven months later, the platform acquired Quinn, a luxury communications firm with offices in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and London. The roster passed 150 people.
In March 2026, North & Warren, Quinn and Interluxe took a single name: Interluxe Group. Van Sicklen became founder and CEO; Carroll became founder and chief commercial officer. The original company name disappeared, but its origin did not. A venture named for one New York corner now worked across two continents.
Beauty gets a scoreboard
Luxury is not an easy category to systematize. Its value often lives in details that resist a dashboard: the weight of an invitation, the room chosen for dinner, the pace of a film, the discretion of the service. Measurement can flatten those things. Romance without measurement, meanwhile, is an expensive faith.
Interluxe’s proposition is that the two can sit together. Media creates attention. Communications gives the story public life. Experiences make it physical. Audience intelligence identifies the people most likely to care. Performance marketing follows the path to action.
The June 2026 acquisition of adMixt filled the performance gap with paid search, paid social, analytics and optimization technology. It pushed the organization beyond 200 people. A separate Interluxe product, the Optima AI Index, began tracking whether luxury brands appeared in answers from generative AI systems. For a founder who once argued that content should respond to audience signals, the direction is consistent: instinct makes better work when it has something precise to push against.
There is also a tactical echo from soccer. A forward may produce the visible finish, but the move starts earlier - with positioning, a recovered ball, a pass into space. Van Sicklen’s agency now makes the same argument about brands. The glamorous moment is only one touch in a longer sequence. Awareness, consideration, experience and conversion belong to the same play.
The career changed shape, but not its grammar: find space, trust the pass, keep the team moving.The through-line from Madison to New York
Van Sicklen’s public manner is more operator than oracle. He speaks readily about missteps, including the expensive ones. He gives teams the credit and treats acquisitions as additions of people before additions of capabilities. This may be polished corporate diplomacy. It is also what one would expect from somebody whose happiest college memories concern his wedding party rather than his place in the record book.
A professional playing career compresses time. Every roster is provisional. Form vanishes; coaches change; contracts end. Company building stretches the horizon, but it asks for the same tolerance of uncertainty. North & Warren started with two people who knew each other’s game. Interluxe is now large enough that Van Sicklen cannot know every movement on the field. His work is to preserve a shared direction while giving specialists room to play.
The neat ending would be that sport prepared him perfectly for business. It did not. Nothing prepares a founder perfectly, and he has been candid about learning in public. Sport gave him something less glamorous and more durable: an appetite for the huddle, comfort with the score and a preference for winning beside people he trusts. The job changed. The useful part of the identity stayed.