minneapolis
(20)
The Company That Answers Someone Else’s Phone
Ewald Consulting runs the unglamorous machinery behind dozens of associations. Its smartest move was not adding more people, but making one system carry more of the load.
The Ad Agency That Chose Three Fields
Most agencies promise range. Curious Plot built its advantage by drawing a fence around food, agriculture and animal care - then learning nearly everything inside it.
Latitude Gave Half Away. Then It Lost Almost Everything.
A Minneapolis creative agency made generosity a fixed cost of doing business. When the pandemic erased 90% of revenue in a week, the rule looked reckless - until it became the reason to rebuild.
Level Mpls Found Its Edge in the Work Nobody Can Explain Quickly
A Minneapolis agency built a specialty out of the awkward brief: health warnings, fair-lending programs, workforce shortages and public services. Its trick is to make the complicated feel personal - then count what people do next.
The Infrastructure Firm That Brings Jenga to a Street Fight
Zan Associates works in the awkward space between a transportation plan and the people expected to live with it. Its trick is disarmingly practical: leave the hearing room, make participation tangible, and show residents where their fingerprints landed.
The Agency That Translates Before It Writes
Most agencies begin with a message and search for an audience. NewPublica begins with the audience - then lets six languages, 88 rules and a few thousand tacos decide what the message should become.
The PR Firm That Learned to Let Go
Kristi Piehl built a PR agency with newsroom instincts, a measurable promise and a peculiar idea about time: people might produce better work when the boss stops counting their hours.
The Firm That Came Home Before It Went Away
Rapp Strategies tried to expand beyond Minnesota. Then two early failures sent Todd Rapp back to the place where the firm already had trust, fluency and room to grow. The retreat became the strategy.
The PR Firm That Took a Sledgehammer to Its Own Status Symbols
Tunheim spent decades helping institutions explain change. Its more revealing campaign began when the agency admitted that hourly billing, corner offices and old-fashioned reviews were confusing its own value.
The Marketing Agency That Planted the Brief
Haberman grew a marketing agency by insisting that a good story must survive contact with a farm, a focus group and a sales chart. Thirty-two years later, its most persuasive product may be the habit of changing course.
The Ad Agency That Hands the Marker to the Audience
For forty years, Russell Herder has sold strategy, design and media. Its more interesting product is a way of listening - one that lets the people inside a problem help write the campaign.
Adventure Sold the Outdoors by Measuring the Dream
Adventure built ads for people who would rather be outside. Its sharper trick was proving that longing could be researched, aimed and counted.
YYES knows what a brand should keep
A 1925 letterhead, a Hollywood agency’s orange, a restaurant meal packed for the journey home: YYES finds new uses for familiar things. Inside the design studio that asks what a business should carry forward.
NorthRock Built a $12 Billion Firm Around the Rich Person's Worst Job: Coordination
Wealth creates options - and an absurd amount of administrative work. NorthRock's bet is that affluent clients will pay one team to make the investment manager, CPA, estate lawyer, insurance adviser and philanthropy plan behave like one system.
The Minneapolis Shop That Turns Lab IP Into Real Companies
Most venture firms write checks and wait. Invenshure hires the scientists, licenses the patents, and builds the company itself - one hard problem at a time.
The Y Dropped the Map and Kept the Compass
One of North America's largest Ys traded a geographic name for a directional one - and kept doing the unglamorous work of raising kids, teaching swimming, and holding neighborhoods together.
Regis Corporation
The company that quietly cuts millions of heads of hair a year runs almost no salons of its own. Here is how a 100-year-old chain rebuilt itself around franchisees, royalties and the corner-strip haircut.
Minnesota Vikings
Minnesota's NFL franchise has spent six decades turning purple, ritual and recurring heartbreak into a durable consumer business. Its real product is bigger than football: a weekly reason for millions of people to belong.
Aurelius
A research repository built by two UX veterans in a Minneapolis basement, Aurelius helps product teams turn piles of interview notes into searchable, shareable insights - without losing a single finding to a forgotten spreadsheet.
River Health
River Health is a Minneapolis digital health company building the first health plan designed specifically for hourly and mixed workforces - the roughly 75 million American workers who earn too much for Medicaid but can't afford traditional insurance. For a flat monthly fee with no copays, deductibles, or hidden charges, members get virtual and in-person primary care, behavioral health, labs, and prescriptions delivered to their door. River sells directly to employers like Taco Bell and Raising Cane's who want to offer real benefits to workers the insurance industry has long ignored.