March 2007: The 100 best companies to work for in Oregon
NO. 10 SMALL COMPANY: QUANGO
Dave Anolik, Quango’s creative director, takes
advantage of the nap room, which also doubles as the
president’s office.
Photo by Leah Nash
|
A place for hard work — and naps
It’s mid-morning in Quango’s cramped offices in
Lake Oswego. The design and marketing company is slowly getting
ready to move and boxes are scattered between cubicles.
In the office of vice president and creative director Dave
Anolik, a handful of the company’s 18 employees are
gathered around his desk, drooling over posters for the
Portland Jazz Festival, one of Quango’s clients.
They’re gorgeous: handmade by a third-generation
letterpress printer in Minnesota. On some, the printer brushed
across the still-wet ink, creating deep texture in the
orange-ish background. They’re individually unique works
of art, made for framing, not phone poles.
Off to one side stands a small, 23-year-old woman with a
cheek-splitting smile. Ashley Carter designed the posters and
just came back from three days in the Midwest, where she took
part in the printing process. Carter bubbles with excitement
when she talks about the trip and her shock when Anolick asked
her if she wanted to go. She’s so blissful that
it’s not hard to believe her when she says it was the
best experience of her professional life — which started
six months before with an internship at Quango.
Thirty-six-year-old president Sean Henderson started Quango
six years ago. Two years later Anolik, 44, came on board. The
two of them are almost excited as their employees. Anolik came
from Intel and a small design company; Henderson’s done
nearly every job in the industry, from pressman to executive
account director at an ad agency. Both say their job at Quango
— which billed for almost $3 million in services last
year — is to be mentors to a creative group of
employees.
And since they’ve hired 100% of their interns, that
mentoring starts soon after they begin perusing candidates from
the nation’s top design schools. It’s a paid,
highly competitive program that requires interns to be ready to
work on big-name-company projects right off the bat. There are
no menial tasks, only the expectation to play a significant
role in a company whose clients range from Hewlett-Packard and
Dell to Adidas and Lego.
Quango doesn’t just mentor its interns. Henderson and
Anolik describe how they try to turn even the most mundane job
for a client into a teaching experience. Their goal is to give
designers the tools they’ll need for whatever work they
do at Quango or beyond.
The company also intentionally takes on jobs that let
its staff designers grow creatively, like the Portland Jazz
Festival. “One reason we’re doing this is because
we’re big music lovers, but this lets people spread their
wings,” says Anolik. “It’s also very public:
national magazines, the web, posters, banners.”
And it lets someone like Carter, who joined Quango as an intern
in July last year and was hired in October, fly to Minnesota to
hang out with a typesetter who uses printing equipment
that’s more than 100 years old. She says the friends she
graduated with are jealous of the work she’s doing and
the environment she works in.
“We can wear what we want, we can have blue hair,”
she says. “They don’t have jobs that have this kind
of creativity.”
But it’s not all fun and blue hair at Quango. Henderson
says the amount of benefits they offered from the first day
made it much harder for the company in its early years. He and
Anolik know it’ll be a challenge to maintain the
company’s creative culture as the need for a human
resource director and employee handbooks looms.
But the men are radiant when they talk about their future
growth. And soon the company will have a new space near
downtown Portland. The offices have four decks overlooking the
Willamette River and a nap room — a must for those
working the occasional 80-hour week.
— Abraham Hyatt
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