Call it organic growth. A south Minneapolis design shop is finding success in a downturn by focusing on food co-ops and other "mission-oriented" clients.
In fact, the past few years have been the best on record for
Spunk Design Machine, a 14-year-old creative boutique in the Nokomis neighborhood.
Founder Jeff Johnson says the shop's work is up at least 30 percent from a year ago, and much of it is in a niche he's coined "mission-oriented branding."
"I feel incredibly excited and bullish about this trend," says Johnson. "All of the clients that are doing mission-oriented branding seem to be succeeding."
They're organizations like the Seward Co-op, Peace Coffee and Galactic Pizza, which, like Spunk, pay attention to a triple bottom line that looks at financial, environmental and community factors. From Johnson's vantage point, it seems that companies selling good products
with a clear message are "rocking it" despite, or perhaps because of,
the recession.
"We've been just really fortunate that we've been attracting a lot of those clients in the past couple of years," says Johnson. Its current roster includes about 30
clients.
Among the projects he's most proud of: a compostable pizza box he designed with Galactic Pizza. Standard pizza boxes can't be recycled because of the grease content. The solution they came up with was to collect and compost the used boxes. The entire box is a $1-off coupon. After they're turned in, they're composted in a bin behind the store, and then the finished compost is sold for roadside planting projects.
Spunk Design Machine opened a New York office a couple of years ago, but Minneapolis remains its home base. Johnson says he's yet to come across a better town to build a creative business: "Minneapolis is just filled with a lot of dorky, humble, very smart people who make amazing stuff."
Source: Jeff Johnson, Spunk Design Machine
Writer:
Dan Haugen