About
We have never been just another design shop.
Skaggs is a New York City brand strategy and creative studio with deep roots in beauty, fragrance, wellness, and human health, founded over two decades ago by two architects who never quite left the drafting table...
Skaggs has spent over two decades working across nearly every category, on nearly every scale, and on nearly every continent, earning over 50 awards along the way.
From NASA to Diptyque, Aston Martin to Australian lamb, Estée Lauder to HBO. From napkin sketches to Microsoft briefs, New York City to Reykjavik, and Tokyo to Monaco. We continue to make big brands bigger, small brands matter, and along the way, create a few new ones too.
The Odin Story
When we founded the studio in San Francisco in 1999, our logo was an illustration consisting of two ravens, a wild tree and a shield. We created it instinctively. We were young, we were curious, and it felt like us. What we did not fully understand at the time was what it would eventually mean.
Odin, the Allfather and the most powerful figure in the Norse cosmos, had two ravens. Huginn, whose name means thought, and Muninn, whose name means memory. Every morning, he sent them out to range across all nine worlds. Every evening, they returned and whispered to him what they had seen. Not what they thought he wanted to hear. What was actually there.
He did not fear losing Huginn. He feared losing Muninn. You can replace a thought. You cannot replace what has been witnessed and remembered. Memory is the thing that makes thought mean something.
Driven by that belief, he hung himself upside down from Yggdrasil for nine days. Wounded by his own spear. No food. No water. Staring into the void below the roots of the world tree. Not because someone made him. Because he believed that what lived in that void was worth the price of seeing it.
On the ninth day, the runes revealed themselves to him.
The sacrifice was not the point. The willingness to keep looking when most people look away is the point. That is the thing that separates the brands that lead from the brands that follow, and it is the thing that separates those who find the truth from those who manufacture a version of it and call it strategy.
We have never stopped looking. What has changed is how far, how deep, and how quickly we can see. We now have the equivalent of Huginn ranging across a brand's entire competitive landscape in the time it used to take us to schedule a kickoff call. Pattern recognition at a scale that was not possible before. The observation function, accelerated.
What has not changed is Muninn. The two-plus decades of memory. Knowing what a brand looks like when its scientific discovery is only discussed in a downloadable white paper. Recognizing when a founder's credential is the most powerful thing in the room and no one has said it out loud. Understanding what it costs a brand when five competitors are making the same claim and none of them own it.
The signal exists.
Our Approach
Our work always starts with a simple question: what does this brand actually have, and why isn't the market seeing it? Our methodology answers the first part. The creative answers the second. Those two things have always happened together, against the same standard. Because a strategy that doesn't end in something beautiful is just a document, and beautiful work with nothing beneath it is just decoration.
Clients tend to notice that what we deliver is more than what was asked for. That's not a policy. It's just how the work goes when you're genuinely invested in the outcome.
Which brings us to Bradley and Jonina. They lead every engagement, not just the pitch, but everything from the first conversation to the final file. Nobody gets handed off. Nobody gets the B team, because there isn't one.
THE FOUNDERS
Both came from architecture.
Neither came from marketing.
That turned out to matter.
Jonina is from Iceland. She completed her studies in architecture before earning a Master’s in branding and design. She then worked at several of San Francisco’s most notable agencies before co-founding Skaggs. She has run the studio since the beginning.
She is the reason the work looks the way it does. Not as an overseer, but as a designer. Jonina works directly on the visual identity, packaging, and design systems that emerge from every engagement, bringing the same precision to a logo mark or typographic system as she brings to the structure of an entire brand architecture. Her eye is the standard the studio works to.
Her design sensibility is European in its restraint and exact in its execution. She considers both the macro and the micro, and believes that perspective and proportion are as essential to brand design as they are to architecture. She has also taught marketing and communications at the University of Iceland and branding and packaging at the College of Arts and Crafts in Northern Iceland, which means that what she practices in the studio she also teaches in the classroom. That combination keeps the thinking honest.
Bradley’s career began in architecture. After completing his B.A., he worked on urban planning and design projects in Germany and Luxembourg, where two principles became permanent: form follows function, and less is more. In 1999, he and Jonina founded Skaggs in San Francisco.
His architecture background was not left behind. It became the framework of methodology. He runs the front of the house. Strategy, new business, and the moment a brand realizes it has been sitting on something it never fully used. Bradley’s instinct is curiosity before critique. What if this brand said the thing it has always been afraid to say? Can you imagine what that does to the category?
His parallel life has been defined by the camera. Bradley leads Skaggs Photo, a high-end beauty product photography studio. His approach to photography is the same as his approach to brand: start with a clear idea, then build everything on top of it.
