A Bengals Fan in Iceland Set Off an Agency Swap
Asked which city Brandenburg wanted as a sister, Jón Ari Helgason answered before the question was finished: Cincinnati. The reason was football. The creative director and founder of the Reykjavik agency is a Bengals fan.
That answer paired Brandenburg with Curiosity from Cincinnati through the IndieHQ Sister City program, which matches independent member agencies in different markets so they can get to know each other. This pairing produced plane tickets.
Curiosity design director Andy Millard spent a week in Iceland. This week, Helgason is in Cincinnati for the return visit.
One email, then a lot of chemistry
Ashley Walters, owner and CMO of Curiosity, traces it to a single introduction. “It started with an email introduction, and we ended up scheduling a call with their team and our team,” she says.
The teams traded capabilities decks, case studies and notes on each other’s cultures and work environments. Then came the idea that turned a video call into a trip.
“Why don’t we do a talent swap?” Walters says. “We’ll send a designer to you. You send somebody to us.”
The goal: to “fully immerse the person into the culture, the cuisine, the art, the work.”
A week in a well-designed city
Millard checked in about the plan a week before the flight. The word from Reykjavik: a few things were booked and the rest would be played by ear.
Helgason met him on arrival and headed for the countryside: big landscapes, fish drying. The city made the deeper impression.
Shops, bars and restaurants across Reykjavik carried considered typography, and Millard describes the place as “so well curated” and authentic. Some of that is Brandenburg’s own work. The agency designed the identity for Messinn, a Reykjavik seafood restaurant started by a friend of Helgason’s.
The dog approved
A day trip along Iceland’s south coast to the town of Vík delivered waterfalls, a glacier, cliffs and the swap’s most reliable character reference. Helgason brought his dog.
“My dog really doesn’t like anybody, but he really loved Andy from the get-go, and he sat in his lap the whole trip,” Helgason says.
The restaurant in Vík kept dogs outside, so the group took an outdoor table. Then the rain started, the staff took pity and a spot opened in the basement. Millard ordered cod and calls it one of his favorite meals in Iceland.
Fermented shark stayed off the menu all week. Helgason wanted his guest to come back.
Cincinnati’s turn
Skyline Chili made the Cincinnati itinerary, and Helgason arrived with an open mind and a visual. “Everybody in Cincinnati says it’s really good, but it looks like spaghetti with lots of cheese on it,” he says.
Millard planned the rest by the same play-it-by-ear method: drinks at small neighborhood bars, old architecture and signage around the university, ghost billboards on downtown buildings.
The calendar helped. The visit overlaps with BLINK, the light and projection-mapping festival that fills the streets around Curiosity’s office. Millard calls it “the biggest creative event in the city.”
What the desks taught them
Each visitor noticed the furniture. At Brandenburg, desks sit close together and people stand up and talk.
“Everyone would just get up and collaborate,” Millard says. “They would just get up and talk about the project.”
Helgason hadn’t registered it until a guest pointed it out. “It’s not something that we plan or teach people. It’s just something about our culture,” he says.
Some of it is by design. For about 10 years, Brandenburg has seated art directors beside copywriters and accountants, then periodically reshuffled everyone.
“People really hate it, at least for the first couple of days,” Helgason says. His case for the shuffle: “You get to know another person just by sitting next to that person.”
Curiosity runs a different experiment: open seating in a bigger space, with 15 employees spread across the country and a laptop open in most meetings. Walters says people have “found their homes” anyway.
Helgason called the Cincinnati office “mind blowingly cool” and is weighing open seating for Reykjavik.
From pilot to perk
Walters is direct about what makes a Sister City pairing work. “You’re only going to get out what you put in, and not every sister city relationship has been successful,” she says. “This is by far our most successful.”
Curiosity now wants to pilot the swap internally and offer exchanges with other agencies as a standing employee benefit.
“I love investing in him being able to get out and experience design from a totally different perspective and bring some of that inspiration back here,” Walters says of Millard.
Helgason has a parting gift planned for the Curiosity team: Icelandic vocabulary, mostly profanity, taught with the wrong translations. Whoever Curiosity sends to Reykjavik next will arrive with plenty to say.
Learn more
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Ashley Walters LinkedIn
Andy Millard LinkedIn
Jón Ari Helgason LinkedIn
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Contact: ashley@curiosity.fun | 513.744.6000 | jari@brandenburg.is | +354 419 9900