Let’s work together.

WHQ, also known as World Headquarters, is a digital experience agency for brands that make things. We work with manufacturers, consumer brands, and B2B product companies. Getting a product chosen takes three things working together: the brand it lives inside, the commerce platform it sells through, and the content architecture that lets search engines, AI assistants, and buyers understand it correctly. Most agencies sell those separately. We build them as one system, and we cover the whole path from strategy and research through design, development, and launch.

Yes. World Headquarters is our full name, and WHQ is the short form we use day to day. Both refer to the same independent agency, founded in Chicago in 2007.

Companies that make physical products. That includes manufacturers, consumer brands, B2B product companies, and architectural and building-product brands, from category leaders like Sloan to growing brands entering new markets. We also take on select work for experience-led brands in hospitality and culture, and for financial services firms with complex offerings. What our clients share is a product that has to be discovered, understood, and chosen, and a team that wants a senior partner to make that happen.

Two things. First, we build brand, commerce, and discoverability as one connected system rather than three separate projects you have to stitch together, which is where most product companies lose the thread. Second, we are deliberately small, so you work directly with the founder and our design and engineering leads. The senior people who pitch the work are the senior people who do it, with no handoff to a junior team after kickoff. That is why our relationships tend to run for years rather than projects. Sloan has been a client for over a decade.

GEO, short for generative engine optimization, is the work of making your brand and products legible to AI systems, the way technical SEO once made sites legible to search engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews now shape what buyers consider before they ever reach a website. We build the structured data, content architecture, and entity grounding that put your products inside those answers, and we monitor that visibility as the models change.

We choose the stack that fits the business rather than forcing every client onto one platform. We build composable and headless commerce, and we work across SAP Commerce, Salesforce, and WordPress, with React front-ends and a structured data layer that connects product information to the experiences around it. The aim is a platform your team can run and grow.

It depends on scope, and we will be straight with you about that. Pricing follows the way we set up the engagement. A Strategy Sprint is a fixed price for a short, focused piece of work. A Project Engagement carries a fixed project fee, scoped and agreed before we start, for a launch, redesign, or replatform. An Ongoing Partnership is a monthly retainer for continued design, platform, and discoverability support. After a first conversation, we recommend the model that fits and send a proposal with clear costs and timelines.

It depends on the model. A Strategy Sprint usually runs a few weeks. A Project Engagement is scoped case by case around the launch, redesign, or replatform in front of it. An Ongoing Partnership continues for as long as it earns its place, which in our case has often meant years. You get a clear timeline in the proposal before any work begins.

Yes, when the fit is right. We do our best work with product companies at a pivotal moment, launching a new category, entering a new market, or rebuilding a platform that growth has outpaced. That holds whether you are an early-stage startup or an established brand. What matters is that you are making something real and you want a senior partner to help people find, understand, and choose it.

WHQ is based in Chicago, Illinois, and works with clients across the US and internationally. You can reach us at [email protected].