Swedish company: ACNE

The brainchild of four friends with a slightly off-the-wall work ethic, ACNE has evolved over the past 13 years into a ‘creative collective’ encapsulating advertising, graphic design, fashion and film.

Tucked away in a beautiful part of old Stockholm called Gamla Stan, in a grand building that was formerly a bank, resides ACNE. Any introduction to a company would usually begin with an explanation of what exactly the organisation is and what it does, but with ACNE it’s not quite as straightforward, because even those who work at ACNE – including one of the four founder members – struggle to truly define it. The easiest and broadest definition of the company would be to call it a 'creative collective', a group of talented and like-minded people coming together to create. To create what, though, is where it gets both interesting and a little bit messy.

Many of you might know ACNE as an advertising agency, which it is. Many of you may know it as a directing collective, which it also is. The more sartorially switched-on of you might recognise ACNE as a successful fashion label, and you get a pat on the back for that too. But ACNE is also a graphic design studio, a publishing house, a digital production company and many other things in between. So you see, ‘creative collective’ seems about the best solution to cover all the bases.

ACNE’s official roots are back in 1997, when the company was formally launched, but its genesis was a few years prior to that, when four friends and creative people decided to get together outside of their day-to-day work to explore new ideas and avenues of work. Three of the men (Tomas Skoging, Jesper Kouthoofd and Mats Johansson) came from a graphic-design background, while the fourth (Johnny Johansson) worked in fashion, for Diesel jeans.

Shared interests

Their shared interests and their passion for unconventional thinking and unusual ways of working eventually led them to formalise their until-then underground company, and so ACNE was born. “We treated ACNE as a brand, rather than as a regular company, so people couldn’t really put us in a box,” explains Skoging, who along with Johansson is one of the two remaining founder members of ACNE. “We weren’t really a design agency as such and we weren’t really like a traditional advertising agency. We just did whatever we felt like doing. The dream, the ambition back then, was to one day be able to live off of our own products and projects and to mix that with consulting.”

Richard Björlin, chief executive officer of ACNE Production, succinctly explains what ACNE was like at the beginning: “It was chaos. It was creative as hell, but one day they’d be designing a synthesiser, the next a camera, then crazy TV content – not spots and not programming but very creative and very weird – then designing toothpaste packaging and things like that. And then there were the 100 pairs of jeans that they designed.”

The latter is a reference to the beginnings of what is now a multi-national, hugely successful and widely respected fashion label. Instigated by Johansson because ACNE didn’t want to go down the usual route of creating branded t-shirts, ACNE Fashion & Denim is now one of the major components of the ACNE empire. ACNE continued in this slightly chaotic but highly creative fashion for some time before, in 2001, it was decided that the company needed to grow up a bit. This is when the different companies within ACNE were established.

There was: ACNE Creative, the advertising agency; ACNE Film, the production and directing facet; ACNE Character; and the forerunner to ACNE Fashion & Denim, ACNE Jeans. “Each company had to be responsible for itself and build on what it was doing,” explains Björlin, “which made it more focused, and that’s when we started to make the company more like it is today.”

What ACNE stands for

Where the name ACNE actually came from seems as hard to define as the workings of the company itself. A few shakes of heads and non-committal answers are offered before Björlin concedes that there are various interpretations of what ACNE stands for, none of which are necessarily official. “ACNE stands for a lot of, well, no-one really knows,” laughs Björlin. “There are different interpretations; Association of Computer Nerds Enterprises [is one] and when ACNE approached Harrods to stock the jeans, they wanted to use them but didn’t like the name. So we said it meant Ambition to Create Novel Expression, which made it OK for them.”

When Björlin talks about the advertising and production side of ACNE, he is quick to point out that one of the big bonuses of working with, and also within, the ACNE group is the crosspollination of ideas and the immediacy of moving from one department to another; a campaign created through the ACNE brand can be truly integrated. “Because we’re in the same house,” says Björlin, “we can make things happen very fast and all work together very easily.”

And now it’s not just ACNE Advertising (previously ACNE Creative) and ACNE Production (previously ACNE Film) that can throw their hat into the ring. “ACNE Digital started out pretty small four years ago,” explains Markus Forsberg, interactive director at ACNE Production, which houses the digital department. “We went in with the idea not to grow too fast but to do high-quality work. There are so many great digital companies here in Sweden – B-Reel, North Kingdom, Perfect Fools – but we had the goal to keep that high quality that they are also doing and hopefully, at some point down the line, be even better than them. It’s worked very well for us – it was slow going at the beginning because people didn’t know that we could help with their digital projects. But ACNE is a great brand to have behind you and when we got those projects, we gave a really high-quality finish to them and so more and more came our way.”

To further enhance the ideal that ACNE is a place of idea first and business plan later, ACNE Digital also got in on the act of, as Skoging calls it, “just doing what we feel like doing” when it started ACNE Play. This brand within a brand within a brand deals with the recently emerged but already hugely popular – not to mention lucrative – market of game applications for mobile devices. They have already built and released a game called Pizza Boy. “There’s no grand scheme behind things,” claims Forsberg. “It’s just that somebody had an idea they thought was interesting and wanted to try it out.”

Different facets

Of course, coming up with different ideas regardless of financial gain is all well and good, but ACNE, as well as a creative hothouse, is also a business and it’s these different ideas that, if successful, are the fuel that keeps the company’s engines burning. “We hope all these different facets, as interesting as they are and as exciting as they can be, eventually translate to our clients,” says Forsberg, “and that we can use the knowledge we’ve gained and feed it into client projects.”

At the heart of ACNE, whatever part of it you explore, are people. The creative side roads and interesting, unusual avenues that ACNE employees take are what link everything together. That these diversions more often than not lead to successful projects, be they in advertising, design, fashion or fi lm, seems to be a happy coincidence.

“We had some problems in the past with people we hired,” concludes Skoging. “They were focusing on the legacy of ACNE and the ACNE name, rather than focusing on what it was they wanted to do. You have to focus on what can make a better tomorrow. Of course we’re very proud of the legacy and the history of ACNE but it’s about the future, not the past.”