Hire Us!
It’s normal (heck, even healthy) for brand owners and builders to be super dialed-in on their business, category, and consumers. But sometimes this soup can get dull (dare we say boring) and murky. We know, we’ve been there. You think building a start-up or unlocking growth on decades- and- centuries-old brands was all roses and unicorns? Not even a little bit.
In our careers, we’ve become masters of looking laterally to find— not just the nuggets— but the threads of inspiration that pull brands (and their owners and builders) out of the muck. We call these threads Micro Forces. They’re consumer-driven innovations, rising tides, or marketplace themes with real growth and solutions potential… and some much needed juiciness.
Our Services
Need just a hand? Great. Schedule a 30-minute consulting call with us to tell us what has you stuck. We’ll quickly put our heads together and send you a follow-up email with some suggestions to help you take action.
Cost: $250, e-billed upon completion.
Includes 30-minute consulting call and follow-up action email.
Want more? We offer two tiers of our Micro Forces Audit service.
Tier 1: Custom Audit
We’ll plan and execute a Micro Forces Audit unique to your brand growth challenge or need, in one or more recommended markets. The output is a detailed summary of consumer-driven innovations, key insights, and marketplace themes in adjacent categories that we believe could point to solutions for your brand.Cost: $10,000 - $20,000, depending on the number of categories and markets.
Tier 2: Custom Audit + Solutions Plan
We’ll plan and execute your Micro Forces Audit and work with your team or our own band of creatives and creators to develop a range of concepts or solutions specially designed to address your brand growth challenge or need.Cost: scope dependent.
To discuss a Micro Forces Audit for your brand and receive a custom quote, please email us to arrange a free briefing call.
How We Work
We partner on all projects to achieve dual-market and dual-mind perspective.
We also love partnering with our clients and will often dive right in to understand you and your business. Basically, we’re nosy and often jump right to the “we’re all friends here” stage of the relationship— for good reason. We want to deliver perspectives and work that’s meaningful and actionable to you. We’re down with CDAs, NDAs, whatever you want. Confidentiality is our jam. Just give us a heads-up on your category and comfort zone and we’ll let you know if we have any conflicts.
Consulting Calls are billed upon delivery of a summary actions email.
Market Forces Audit projects are billed 50% upfront and 50% upon completion.
About Us
We’re Mia and Ellen, authors of On Brand and experienced brand and creative strategists. We’ve been building brands together by looking laterally for over a decade. As agency colleagues, we worked on innovation, strategy, positioning and messaging for brands like Coca-Cola, Morton Salt, 3M, Mars-Wrigley and MolsonCoors. As co-founders of Nyssa, we invented and brought to market award-winning innovations that were credited with “revolutionizing the landscape of women’s wellbeing” (Forbes) and displayed in international museums including the Bill & Melinda Gates Discovery Center and the MoMa Design Store.
We are:
London and Chicago-based. Our across-the-pond collaboration offers immediate “boots on the ground” perspective from two of the world’s leading-edge markets.
Independent, agile and incisive. We don’t give you a surface-level trend report. Our insights and ideas are calibrated to be meaningful, viable and feasible for your business.
Experienced from “the trenches”. We’ve had front-row seats to what it really takes to grow brands— new and legacy— and have lived the tension between vision and execution. We bring this empathy and insight to everything we do.
Custom, confidential, and practical. Each engagement is tailored to your exact brand and business needs.
Some of Our Past Clients & Gigs Include:
