A group of marketing veterans and angel investors are working together to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses through a new Minneapolis-based firm called Artisan Venture Lab.
Artisan Venture Lab made its official debut earlier this week and bills itself as part digital agency and part venture capital firm. The company provides full-cycle e-commerce and web marketing services, and offers also flexible seed funding and investment structures.
In addition to funding, Artisan's core services include consulting, online marketing, full-cycle e-commerce assistance, and Amazon Marketplace strategy and implementation.
"This is the perfect storm for reinventing the traditional agency, digital agency and venture capital models," Artisan co-founder Michael Ackmann said in a statement. "There is pent-up demand among established small to mid-sized companies and startups to quickly bring ideas to market without the high cost of agencies by people who will invest in their success."
Prior to creating Artisan, Ackmann co-founded Ackmann & Dickenson, a 120-person digital agency that was acquired in 2018. He has also backed a handful of technology companies as an angel investor.
Kevin Zinniel, the other co-founder of Artisan, worked with e-commerce and software startups at multiple agencies, including A&D. Zinniel also founded apparel company Range Golf, which has secured partnerships with dozens of golf clubs throughout North America and has a co-branded apparel collection with Pabst Blue Ribbon.
"Artisan's goal is to provide a more sustainable path to market by leveraging cost-efficient resources both in the U.S. and offshore," Zinniel said. "We reroute investment dollars that typically are consumed by agency model overhead and accelerate the ROI for companies who don't have all the required resources or capital for marketing."
Artisan plans to focus on five industries: e-sports, lifestyle, finance, health care and software. Entrepreneurs can apply for funding on Artisan's site. The company said that applicants will be reviewed based on the marketability of their ideas, its level of disruption in the marketplace, scalability and opportunity to co-brand with others.
