Mission was born in 2001. What's happened in the 15 years that have past?

Today it’s time to celebrate the fact that Mission has orbited the sun 15 times. Looking in the rear view mirror, we can see that in no way is the world the same as it was on 1 February 2001. When we started trading, George W. Bush had just taken over as President of the USA. Wikipedia was founded the month before us. Norwegian hadn’t flown anyone abroad at that point. YouTube hadn’t broadcast a single video. Nobody had tweeted on Twitter. Below are a few selected highlights from the past 15 years. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it gives you a taste of client assignments and internal events of all sizes. Enjoy!

15 milestones for Mission

2001

You should maybe have a rethink if you can’t agree on a direction. That was the logic applied when Gary and Bård found that they ought to take the consequences of their sense of direction telling them something completely different to their Scandinavian Design Group (SDG). A partnership with Leo Burnett – who was at the very peak of his success around that time – was launched. The start date: 1 February 2001. The place: Leo Burnett’s premises in Skøyen. But that said, history showed that this was a time when things were torn down, not built up. The Twin Towers fell and the huge dot.com crash meant that Mission faced its biggest uphill climb after just a short time.

2002

Leo Burnett set its sights high, not least as far as the premises were concerned. Moving into the top three floors of the recently refurbished Postgiro building was an ambitious way of saving money. This was also the year in which Bård, having been annoyed for a while about how Expo Nova used their premises on Bygdøy Allé, got in touch with them. This contact was a prelude to a large-scale facelift for Expo Nova and a long relationship with this client.

2003

A fantastic year, really. Innovation Norway. The Telenor group. Ulvang. Thommesen. Early to market with cloud computing. The Merket For God Design award for AFF. Visual gold with Jazzland. But while Mission celebrated winning an award with champagne, Leo Burnett was holding a wake. Mission had two weeks to find new premises. Almost 40 prospective locations later, we found a place directly behind the Royal Palace. Unfortunately, once the five-year lease had been signed, it turned out that Telenor was unable to install a fibre-optic network at the new premises on Inkognitogaten. This did not make life easy. It was time to work like crazy.

2004

If we disregard the entrepreneurial duo, it is Hege and Kalle who have worked the longest in Mission. Hege started already in 2003, Kalle appeared in 2004. Both form a very important part of the creative soul in the company. When Mission was sold as a partner for Akademika, Bård was on a ferry on Lake Como in northern Italy with sixty noisy schoolchildren on board. But you have to put up with some school students if you are going to work for Akademika. The new identity of the National Museum was presented, and EDB became our Business Partner, too.

2005

There are times when people who you can work and communicate really well with just turn up. We’d already worked with Tone Rydjord when she was the Director of Marketing for Krogsveen, and from 2005 we helped her with something else – the Norwegian Automobile Federation (NAF). We devised both a name and a concept for the new Oxigeno fitness centre. This was also the year in which Mission was nominated for the Merket For God Design Honorary Award thanks to the work we did with Expo Nova.

2006

Inki and her infectious laughter turned up in 2006, which means that she’s celebrating her 10th anniversary with Mission in 2016. You can’t really say she laughed all the way to the bank, but even so an exciting new bank client turned up the same year. Sparebank1, along with their EiendomsMegler1, suddenly became part of our client list.

2007

Oh England, My Lionheart! Gary, one of the two cornerstones of Mission, moved back to his homeland in 2007, but a lot had changed over the past few years. Long distances were no longer a major problem. And even if Mr Swindell spent most of his time working from home, he visited Oslo every month. Mission enjoyed the best of both worlds. OBOS and OBOS Forretningsbygg popped up on our schedule.

2008

Åsa, who started working for the company in 2006, moved to Chamonix in order to go skiing and run a hotel, but she still continued working for Mission. So since 2008 we’ve had departments in both the UK and France. This was the year in which staff at the design company headed for Turin, which had taken on the mantle of design capital of the world for the occasion. This trip included a visit to and tour of car design company Pininfarina, which was responsible for a lot of the best designs by Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Maserati. Then add to that sitting in some unique concept cars and a trip to the old Fiat head office, with its racetrack on the roof, and you have some very happy car fans indeed.

2009

The company with the country’s most difficult name became one of our clients in 2009. If you want to stand out as a modern, outward-facing public transport stakeholder, you simply can’t call yourself Kollektivtransportproduksjon AS. Both the manager, Cato Hellesjø, and his 4000 or so staff were in no doubt about this. Nowadays we know them as Sporveien, and Mission has made sure they’ve got a profile that shines brightly in the urban landscape – in yellow and orange.

2010

Some of Mission's employees have a special amore for Italian, which is not uncommon in quality-hungry design circles. This year, the entire Mission travelled to Milan, where the annual furniture fair was, of course, on the agenda. A little piece of paradise for Expo Nova, which works closely with many of the most exclusive Italian furniture suppliers. Among other things, the design major B&B Italia opened its doors to the small design group from Norway. We started a collaboration with the Norwegian Design Council. We produced the Design Book, worked with the Good Design Label and played a key role in the launch of DIP, the Design-driven Innovation Programme. Another client that emerged in 2010, and for whom we have done many different exciting jobs over time, is Studentsamskipnaden i Oslo og Akershus (SiO). Here we were behind the identity and also the sub-concepts Athletica and Deiglig.

2011

With EDB Business Partner, we received the Mark For Good Design. SiO's fitness center chain was named Athletica , and we started working on design strategy for the ambitious law firm Schjødt . We should not take credit for Schjødt today, five years later, becoming one of the four major law firms, but we are very much complicit in the company's new face externally. On 1 June, we moved into our current premises in one of Indekshuset's wings, with a view of the National Library's wild wine, the roundabout at Solli Plass and Winston Churchill on the shelf. Airy rooms, a large, sunny veranda and well-chosen furniture via Expo Nova make this a good place to work.

2012

When Terra wanted to change its name, change its style and content, and not least become the local banks' best friend again, it was Mission that was behind much of this revolution. Via detours we ended up at Eika as a name. Thus, we got a positive synergy from the old savings bank symbol, but did so in a way that pointed to the future. Another new customer we got was BAMA Storkjøkken . We have helped them become more visible to the country's chefs and chefs. In addition, Hedda Hytter appeared this year.

2013

New York, New York! The entire Mission team headed for the Big Apple. We took part in a seminar with Fast Company, where Mark Parker, Chief Executive Officer of Nike, spoke at length about his company’s success, where Angela Ahrendt spoke vividly about Burberry just before she announced her move to Apple, where we found out why the Uber app became so huge, and where we were able to visit companies such as Google, Pepsi and Pentagram. And we haven’t even mentioned the city and all the places that make it the capital of the world.

2014

A small piece of Apple comes to Mission. Ken Segall visits us and shares stores from his time with Jobs & Co. Herkules Capital is a fund-based company moving billions of Norwegian kroner and with a unique ability to sniff out and invest in the winners of tomorrow. The fact that they sniffed us out and that we’ve been able to develop various identity-creating measures for them has to be a positive sign! Reitan Convenience is Norway’s biggest name when it comes to the kiosk, petrol and service trade. You’re never far from a kiosk belonging to Narvesen or 7-ELEVEN. It’s been our pleasure to implement a number of exciting projects for them over the past two years, and there are more to come. We’ll say no more. Yet.

2015

We make a living from creating identities that work in relation to what our clients are aiming to achieve. And that’s why we ought to take our own medicine occasionally. Business strategist and author David C. Baker has helped us out enormously as we’ve tried to find ourselves, and we’ve come a long way with our long-term partnership with digital strategy company Newfangled. The autumn of 2015 saw the launch of our blog, which presents valuable insights several times a week. Mission implemented a very extensive design and restructuring assignment for EDB Business Partner until they merged with Ergo Group in 2010 and became the biggest IT company in Norway. The company took on the new name of Evry, and designers other than ours carried on working with the company. That’s why it even more pleasing to see that Evry has now decided to go with us.

2016

Fifteen years have passed. The years we have left behind tell us that we should not claim that we know what the next 15 will be like. But for our part, it looks promising so far. We have the pleasure of working with customers we all know well, and we of course welcome new customers as well. We would very much like to hear from you if you have questions or want to learn more about what we work with. Stay up to date on what we are working on by subscribing to our newsletter. Welcome.