Best for: Mid-to-large organizations — across tech, consumer, B2B, and culture — that need brand strategy and design working together at scale. Particularly strong for global rebrands, complex multi-market identity systems, and organizations that want brand to function as a genuine business lever, not just a visual refresh.
Kurppa Hosk occupies a rare position in the Nordic design landscape: genuinely strategic and genuinely beautiful, at size. The “Business Artistry” framing isn’t just positioning — it shows up in the work, which consistently bridges rigorous research and bold visual execution. The Bungie/Marathon partnership alone is one of the most ambitious brand-and-marketing collaborations in recent memory. The caveat is access: with 200+ people and a client list that includes Nike, Zalando, and Meta, this is not a studio hunting for small projects.
Reviewed by Chelsea Greene
The Full Read
Thomas Kurppa didn’t come up through design school. He came up through electronic music — producing techno in the 90s, obsessing over Peter Saville, Mark Farrow, and the Warp Records visual universe, before almost accidentally becoming one of Sweden’s most respected brand designers. In 2009, he co-founded Kurppa Hosk in Stockholm with Måns Jacobsson Hosk, with the explicit ambition of building one of the world’s best design agencies. It took about fifteen years. They got there.
Today, Kurppa Hosk is Scandinavia’s largest brand and design agency — a status it reached in January 2025 when it absorbed two of Norway’s most celebrated studios, Neue Design Studio and Heydays, bringing total headcount past 200 across Stockholm, Oslo, New York, Chicago, and London. The agency is part of Eidra, a consultancy collective that sits alongside strategy, engineering, and digital performance capabilities — meaning Kurppa Hosk can plug into a broader transformation stack when a client engagement calls for it.
What separates Kurppa Hosk from most agencies of its size is that the work hasn’t gotten soft. The portfolio is dense with genuinely brave creative decisions: a five-year creative partnership with Bungie that turned Marathon’s go-to-market into a living brand ecosystem, co-creating the Nike Podium Design System with Nike’s internal teams, a total corporate identity for Alleima (carved out of Sandvik for its Nasdaq listing) that won a Red Dot Award. The studio’s internal type foundry, KH Type, is itself a signal — it’s a rare agency that considers type seriously enough to build infrastructure around it.
The organizing principle is what they call Business Artistry: the belief that commercial rigor and emotional resonance belong in the same brief. It’s a framework that keeps strategy and design genuinely integrated, rather than sequenced and handed off.
What Kurppa Hosk Does
Six integrated practice areas, typically combined across a single engagement.
Insight
The research and analysis foundation. Qualitative and quantitative work that maps competitive reality and defines the truthful starting point for strategy.
Brand Audit · Market Research · Competitive Analysis · Consumer Insight · Behavioral Research
Strategy
The direction-setting layer. Turning insight into a brand platform that can drive decisive business action.
Brand Strategy · Brand Architecture · Positioning · Naming · Messaging Frameworks
Identity
Visual and verbal translation of strategy into a magnetic brand presence.
Visual Identity · Verbal Identity · Logotype · Typography · Brand Guidelines · Design Systems
Experience
Bringing the brand into three dimensions across digital and physical touchpoints.
Digital Design · App & Product Design · Spatial Design · Motion · Packaging
Activation
Making brand ideas land in the world — campaigns, launches, and community ecosystems.
Campaign Strategy · Integrated Marketing · Content & Social · Experiential · Go-to-Market
Governance
Keeping the brand consistent and relevant across markets and over time.
Brand Management · Operative Models · Brand Tools · Organization Design
KH Type
A standalone type foundry offering retail and bespoke typefaces — available to clients and the public.
Selected Work
A snapshot of recent named projects. Full case studies on the agency’s site.
Bungie / Marathon
Brand Strategy · Identity · Campaign · Activation
A five-year creative partnership to relaunch the Marathon IP — covering worldbuilding, faction brand identities, full go-to-market strategy, paid media, social, community environments, and experiential. One of the most ambitious brand-and-marketing collaborations in gaming.
Nike
Design System
Co-creating the Nike Podium Design System with internal Nike teams — a unified design language covering typography, color, grids, motion principles, and data visualization, built to scale across global disciplines.
Zalando
Brand
Brand work for one of Europe’s largest fashion and lifestyle platforms.
Meta / LlamaCon
Brand · Identity
Brand identity work for Meta’s LlamaCon event.
Alleima
Corporate Identity
Full brand creation for Sandvik’s spin-out listing on Nasdaq — naming, design, and launch of an entirely new global corporate identity. Red Dot Award winner.
Brand
Brand design work for the global visual discovery platform.
Securitas
Brand
Global identity work for one of the world’s largest security services companies.
Tugg Burgers
Brand Identity · Film & Animation
Full rebrand of the Swedish burger chain — won the Red Dot: Best of the Best Award, the competition’s highest distinction.
Swedish Olympic Committee
Brand
Identity work for Sweden’s Olympic governing body.
Hire Kurppa Hosk If You Need…
- A full brand transformation at scale — strategy through identity through activation, without splitting vendors
- A studio with genuine enterprise-grade credentials and multi-year partnership experience (Nike, Zalando, Bungie, Meta)
- Nordic design rigor with a US footprint — useful for Scandinavian companies expanding to North America, or US companies entering European markets
- A partner that can connect the brand to a wider business transformation (via the Eidra group)
- Red Dot–level craft ambition with the organizational depth to sustain it across complex, multi-market engagements
Skip Kurppa Hosk If…
- Your budget is at the startup or SMB level — their scale and client list signal a floor well above most early-stage budgets
- You need a packaging-first or product-identity studio for a consumer SKU launch — this is primarily a corporate and digital brand agency
- You want a boutique relationship with a single lead designer on every touchpoint
- Your project is primarily offline or OOH campaign execution without a brand strategy component
Independent Verification
Awards
Red Dot: Best of the Best (Tugg Burgers, 2023) · Red Dot Award × 3 (Tugg, Vindmark, Alleima, 2023) · Guldägg nomination (Design Identity, Sweden’s oldest communications competition) · AGI membership (Thomas Kurppa — Alliance Graphique Internationale, ~500 members globally)
Press
DesignRush
Listed with clients including Scania, Sandvik, H&M, Estée Lauder, Securitas, Pinterest, Dustin, and Intrum.
Note: Kurppa Hosk’s reputation lives primarily in design press and award circuits rather than B2B review platforms. Given the caliber and length of their client relationships — multi-year partnerships with Nike, Bungie, and Zalando — this is a credibility signal rather than a gap.
If Kurppa Hosk Isn’t the Right Fit
Mission Control
AI-supported branding for early-stage fintech and B2B tech. Lower budget bracket, faster delivery.
COLLINS
Bigger creative vision, more conceptually adventurous. Stronger for consumer brands needing cultural impact.
Mucho
Similar minimalist sensibility and global reach. Better suited to brands with strong cultural or editorial dimensions alongside identity work.
Frequently Asked Questions
In Stockholm in 2009, by Thomas Kurppa and Måns Jacobsson Hosk. Both are still at the agency — Thomas as Chief Creative Officer, Måns as Managing Director and Co-CEO of the wider Eidra collective.
Since January 2025, when Norwegian agencies Neue Design Studio and Heydays became part of Kurppa Hosk, the studio has counted 200+ people across Stockholm, Oslo, New York, Chicago, and London — making it Scandinavia’s largest brand and design agency.
Eidra is the consultancy collective that Kurppa Hosk belongs to, alongside companies in strategy, engineering, performance, and digital. It means Kurppa Hosk can bring in adjacent capabilities — technology, management consulting, conversion optimization — when a brand transformation requires more than design alone.
KH Type is Kurppa Hosk’s own type foundry, offering both retail typefaces and bespoke commissions. It’s a relatively rare capability for a brand agency and a strong signal of how seriously the studio treats typography as a brand differentiator.
Broadly: technology, consumer, financial services, industrial/B2B, culture, and sport. Named clients include Nike, Zalando, Meta, Pinterest, Bungie, Estée Lauder, La Mer, Bobbi Brown, Scania, Securitas, H&M, Telia, and the Swedish Olympic Committee — a deliberately cross-sector portfolio.
Yes — their own language includes early-stage companies, and the portfolio includes work for ventures such as Heart Aerospace, Aira, and Anyfin. The practical floor is likely a meaningful brand strategy and identity budget rather than a logo-only engagement.
Ready to see if Kurppa Hosk fits your project?
Visit the agency’s site to view their full portfolio, or compare them against the rest of our top picks.