Jonathan King of Quality Meats explains the agency name with a butcher shop analogy. You walk in. The butcher knows your name, knows your cut, knows what you’ll like next week. There’s no fat. The Chicago indie, founded five years ago by co-CCOs Brian Siedband and Gordy Sang, leans hard into the metaphor — there’s “meat on every single deck” the team presents.
The model is intentional. Small team. Senior cuts. A “smart/dumb Venn diagram” designed to land brand work in the 14% of stuff that gets noticed instead of the 86% that gets ignored or mis-attributed. Recent client work includes Molson Coors, where CMO Sophia Colucci’s Chicago team has been “embracing creativity and wanting to be bold.”
The agency is proudly weird about all of it. “The world has gotten boring,” King says. “The weirdos are the real heroes of today.”
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How the butcher shop opened
Siedband and Sang launched Quality Meats five years ago around a metaphor that scales. The butcher analogy isn’t a gimmick — it’s the operating model. Small team. Tight relationships. The same people serving you every time.
You don’t get briefed and ghosted for three weeks. You get a constant, iterative conversation with the people doing the work. “Welcome to the sausage making,” King says. “When you work with Quality Meats, we are going to be always talking.”
What Quality Meats is known for: cutting the fat
The agency is small on purpose. King describes the team as senior, concise and tight-knit — a bench stacked with people who can run a brand instead of swirling in formality. Every relationship is integrated. Every conversation is direct.
“We’re honest with the brand. We’re honest about the human, unspoken truths that drive our work,” King says. The job is the work. The frills are the first thing on the cutting board.
Three cuts: strategy, video, and the big idea
King lists three things to call Quality Meats for. First, strategy — cracking briefs, building positioning, writing brand foundations that make the rest of the work better.
Second, video. Social, online, long-form, short-form. Plus the weird-and-wacky cousins: stunts, activations and earned media moments.
Third, the big idea — one that can cascade across an entire brand ecosystem. “We’re real big fans of thinking in an integrated fashion,” King says, “knowing that there’s always going to be a cross-functional team that needs to embrace that big idea — and how do you take that and celebrate it in all the different ways it could come to life?”
Why proud rule-breaking beats process
King has worked at eight agencies. Six were holding companies. The culture shock when he landed at an indie was the absence of templates, forms and swirl. The lack of formality felt scary at first. Then it felt like leverage.
“Quality Meats as an independent — we are proud rule-breakers,” he says. “That’s not meant to shortcut. It’s not meant to ensure corners. It’s meant to say we could do things how we want.” Less time chasing process. More time chopping through what King calls the “matrix corporate structure” to get to the work.
Why brands hire Quality Meats: same team, same speed, same texts
The brand pitch is honest about the speed and the closeness. The team that pitches is the team that works on the business. There’s no A-team-then-B-team handoff. Phone numbers get exchanged. So do texts.
“If you don’t like us, don’t hire us,” King says. “Because we are going to be very connected to you.” The trade-off is total speed. “If you want to talk about a piece of feedback, let’s talk about it in five minutes. We’re able to move at that speed because there isn’t this over-stacked, over-matrix team.”
Why talent chooses Quality Meats: a real reel and a fast bench
Talent gets two things at Quality Meats they don’t get easily elsewhere. First, the agency reel is the work the people still there made. King contrasts it with holding-co reels, where “half that work is done by people that are probably not there anymore.”
Second, the model runs like a production house — a small full-time core wrapped around a vetted bench of permalancers and freelancers who already know the methodology. “If we get a huge project on a Tuesday, by Wednesday I can add 15 to 20 people to our team overnight,” King says. No onboarding. No drag.
Proud weirdos in a doom-scrolling world
When asked to pick between weirdos, misfits or underdogs, King doesn’t hesitate. Weirdos. The Quality Meats site, the team headshots, the illustration style — all of it leans in on purpose.
“The world has gotten boring,” King says. “Everyone’s doom-scrolling. The weirdos are the real heroes of today.” The creative philosophy follows: be dumb in the smartest way possible. Not sophomoric. Not stupid. Tension-filled, audacious and impossible to scroll past.
A hello to Sophia Colucci at Molson Coors
King’s shoutout goes to Sophia Colucci, CMO at Molson Coors, and her Chicago team. “They’ve been really great at embracing our philosophy — willing to roll up their sleeves and do work that really falls in that 14%. They don’t want to be bland.”
Then a closing observation that sounds about right for a Quality Meats relationship: “Great humans.”
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