15 Years of Sergeant: Our Origin Story
15 years, three offices and a fondness for the busier corners of Zurich. A brief history of an agency growing up.
If you want to make a branding agency happy, give them a good origin story. Like how Ingvar Kamprad started IKEA at the age of 17 by mailing pencils from the family garden shed. Or how the founders of Nike sold their first shoes from the boot of a Plymouth, and how Airbnb started with a few rented air mattresses in a shared flat in San Francisco. Not to mention all the giant corporations that were born in humble garages, from Google, Apple and Microsoft to Amazon, Mattel and The Walt Disney Company. Tentative ideas have grown into empires, and company names that were once hopefully scribbled on a piece of paper have become part of our everyday vocabulary.
This is not such a story (yet).
But even Sergeant, now 18 employees and five floors strong, started small. And nothing justifies a wistful look back at one's beginnings more than an anniversary. So please forgive us for reminiscing, but you only turn 15 once.
The Multitaskers of Motorenstrasse
The year is 2009: Obama is president, social media is getting bigger and jeans are getting even skinnier. At Motorenstrasse 20, Michel Müller, then in his mid-30s, finds a free space in a small ground-floor office with four desks. And Sergeant, unofficially named after the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, officially gets its first address.
In those early years, the portfolio is small and the team even smaller. Sergeant’s first hire is Jan, a young brand consultant from Germany. He takes the second desk in the office. There are no real departments. Michel is CEO and consultant, but sometimes also designer or copywriter - whatever is needed. And after just two years, he is also the main tenant of the small office.
Michel drinking coffee in front of our first small office at Motorenstrasse 20, with our old branding on the window.
It has to be said that Michel has always had a good sense of location. Sergeant is right where the action is - or where the good takeaways are. The years on Motorenstrasse are the years of cottu rotti from Friends Corner, momos from Tibetasia and soups from Limmatlädeli. And in between all the good food, there is a lot of work to be done. Two years become five, just as two Sergeants become a team of five. Our range of services continues to expand and we now offer motion design. We celebrate our fifth anniversary with a small cake. And are slowly but surely bursting at the seams.
A Glimpse of St. Jakobsstrasse
In Zurich slang, if you want to tell someone not to make a fuss, you might say «Mach keis Büro uf» (don’t set up an office) or «Mach keis Cabaret» (don’t do cabaret). Ironically, we did set up a second office - in a former cabaret. In 2016, when the former (and thoroughly renovated) Irma La Douce is occupied by a handful of consultants and designers, the news hasn’t yet reached every last member of the former clientele. So when we work at St. Jakobsstrasse 52, we sometimes find someone pressing their nose against the floor-to-ceiling windows to catch a glimpse of the interior.
New branding, new location. Our second office at St. Jakobsstrasse 52 used to be a cabaret.
But the view outside is much more exciting. The area around Stauffacher is bustling, the intersection in front of our corner office is even a little dangerous, and we soon get used to the occasional near-collision and honking outside our front door. Most of the time, however, we have our peace and enjoy our central location. We know what we’re doing and it’s not just our growing customer base that notices. A major employer campaign wins us our first award - and we jet off to Berlin for the ceremony with our long-standing client SIX.
The years on St. Jakobsstrasse are the years of good coffee from Coffee Shack, of Pasta Station, of Friday drinks and outings to Dani H’s. They are the years in which Sergeant continues to grow, Lea joins us, a whole team of developers is formed in Ljubljana - and we once again outgrow our office in Zurich.
No place like Lagerstrasse
2020: The world is upside down... and we're losing our minds. No sooner have we signed the lease on our new office than a global pandemic pulls the rug out from under us. Yes, it’s a bit crazy to be moving and rebranding at the same time. But we need more space for our growing team. And if there’s one thing Lagerstrasse 121 has in abundance, it’s space. A whole house for us – a Sergeant House! Tall, narrow, a little dated, in a somewhat undefinable shade of green, but absolutely charming and with that pergola that immediately becomes the highlight of our summers.
And then there’s the location! It couldn't be more central or closer to the main station. In the first few months we paint the walls together (some of our jeans and shoes are now purple, very «on brand»), furnish the many empty rooms, live almost exclusively on Tenz Momos and spend the first autumn working in semi-darkness because we can’t decide which lamps to buy.
The move to Lagerstrasse 121 is a team effort. Some of our pant legs are still purple from all the painting.
As a small team working more and more from home, it’s not that easy to fill the big empty house. So we call in a few friends: Notice Design takes over the first floor, and journalist Alex Stark, who has been with us through every move since Motorenstrasse, moves upstairs. We settle in, find new office mates, discover new lunch spots, try out the menu at Suppelade (the former Limmatlädeli, which has since moved in next door), and announce loudly and often that we’ll soon be throwing a housewarming party (which we never do). We continue to grow, but the house grows with us, becoming everything we hoped it would be.
A great green house with our name on it - the latest Sergeant branding can even be seen from the train.
Teenage dreams and long distances
Four years at 121 Lagerstrasse and Sergeant is suddenly 15 - a teenager, only a little less moody. Geographically, we haven’t moved very far in all that time, just from District 5 to District 4. We’ve stayed in the «roaming area», as one former employee would put it. But there are more than just a few blocks between that first lonely desk on Motorenstrasse and today. There are worlds of difference. 15 years in which we have constantly evolved, reinvented, adapted and asserted ourselves. And this time we are celebrating with more than just a little cake.
From the very beginning, the contract on Lagerstrasse was a limited one. As much as we love being here, our agency house is only a temporary home. We don't know where we’ll end up next. But that’s OK. We’re still very young. And teenagers don’t need to have it all figured out, do they?
