About — Aino

AINO AGENCY

We are an independent Scandinavian design and technology agency, founded in 2009, formed by talented people with a deep-rooted passion for creative technology.

From niche startups to global enterprises, we build unforgettable brand experiences for the digital age. We use technology to solve complex business challenges, and design to make them look simple and beautiful. When blended in harmony, they serve as silent storytellers, revealing emotions, ambitions, and the very essence of a brand.

What really sets us apart is that we truly care. We care about you, your customers, your technology, and your well-being. We care about our employees, our work/life balance, our planet, and our talent. We believe that everything is ultimately about human-to-human connections, and our job is to connect people through technology and commerce.

When people feel connected, seen, and heard, they start to engage. And engagement is what drives big brands to success.

We don’t talk the middle-management talk, and we won’t waste your money on powerpoints. With us, you will actually get the work done and create exceptional digital experiences with surgical precision that leave imprints, spark emotions and generate real value.

At this point in time in history where almost everything is a generated rewrite of data, people crave something real. Generating the future by computing history will quickly become boring and disposable. No greatest song was ever written using feedback programs and machine learning.

This is why we now, more than ever, need a creative playground to express and explore human feelings that comes from within us. Brands need to position themselves above the AI race and start talking with a real voice, and people need to stay creative to make the world worth living in.

For us, that playground is code. With code, you can do almost anything. But the ironic truth is that most code is also generated and predetermined, based on the same false assumption that data can tell us what to do next. But we believe that there is much more to code than just doing what’s expected.

This is our position, between the creative forces of branding and technology. We want to explore new ideas to enhance the brand message through online interfaces, where the users actually spend time. We think and work like artists and creatives, only our tools are different and our products are used by people.

Inspired by many groundbreaking music artists, we strive to combine the comfortable, the uncomfortable, and the unknown to create tension and excitement in the intersection of user experience. Everyone might not get it at first, but the ones that do will become true fans.

We represent a new wave of creative agencies, built with technology in our DNA instead of middle management and outsourced developers. Thanks to the evolution of frameworks, we have the benefit to stay lean as a company while still maintaining a very high level of complexity and quality in our digital productions.

So if you find yourself throwing money at a big agency and wondering who is really working on your project — we feel you. At Aino, you will get direct access to the people actually building your products, and we do that really well.

Platforms: Centra; Shopify; Google Cloud; Contentful; Storyblok; Vercel

Tech: Node; Next; React; Redis; GraphQL; Apollo

Services: Headless storefronts; Branding; Design systems; UI & UX; Motion design; Creative development

Our clients are brands and organizations with global ambitions to disrupt, scale, and perform online. We help them create, deploy and manage commerce storefronts, campaigns, brand sites, and online platforms for next-generation consumers.

If you feel like you are a good fit for us, please reach out to julie@aino.agency so we can get to know each other. But remember: we only work with nice people!

Aino Aktiebolag is a Swedish company with offices in Gothenburg & Oslo, founded in 2009. The name ”Aino” means ”the only one” and origins from the founder’s grandmother who immigrated from Karelia in the 1930s. Many of our projects wouldn’t be possible without our talented friends at Oridnary who share our office and is a part of the family. This site is a tribute to Text. Fonts used: Diatype by Johannes Breyer & Fabian Harb. (c) 2024 Aino.