Karin Soukup Fyhrie

SFAI Board Member
Founder of Sovereign Objects

Under 15% of global creative agency executives are women — Karin Fyhrie is one of them. She confidently steers Fortune 500 companies, renowned cultural institutions, and hyper-growth start-ups into the future, thanks to her unconventional path in the fields of design and technology.

Over her twenty year career, she has evolved as quickly as the industry has, bringing a uniquely diverse, cross-specialism lens as broad as the word ‘design’ has become. While leading teams at global creative agencies including IDEO, Google Creative Lab, and COLLINS, she comfortably transitioned between product and service innovation, brand strategy, systems design and storytelling for the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Her contributions have been recognized by almost every award in the category, including D&AD, The One Club, AdAge, Fast Company, Graphis, Communication Arts, AIGA, the Society of Publication Designers, Type Directors Club, and the Emmy Awards. Last year, she was honored with the Distinguished Alumni Award from her alma mater, Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Art & Architecture.

In 2016, Karin was a co-recipient of a Media Experiments grant from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford. Through rapid, low-fidelity prototyping and cross-disciplinary research, she revealed key design insights to help journalists ensure that important story information was understood and retained in a 360 VR environment. The subsequent insights were referenced by speakers at Google’s I/O 2017, Interaction 17 and MIT Open Documentary Lab’s ‘Virtually There’ conferences. In a similar spirit, Karin frequently teaches and has worked an adjunct faculty member at New York University, The School of Visual Arts, and Washington University.

For the past three years, Karin has led her own company, Sovereign Objects, a brand and innovation studio that uses worldbuilding methodologies to transport companies into the future. Through scenario mapping, immersive narrative design, and proprietary AI processes, her multi-disciplinary team helps companies to strategically foresee complex business challenges while exploring new opportunities through design R&D. Outcomes typically include robust design infrastructures honed for growth; executive, cross-functional alignment of the business vision; and a deep understanding of their audience’s needs and motivations to drive meaningful engagement. Current clients include everything from stealth stage start-ups in the creator economy to high-impact non-profits like the Obama Foundation. In parallel, Karin is a member of Mixing Board, a think-tank of brand and communications leaders featuring CMOs, heads of comms, seasoned brand strategists, speechwriters and policy veterans.

Prior to founding Sovereign Objects, Karin was the San Francisco Managing Partner of COLLINS, the brand transformation agency responsible for notable brand system evolutions for Spotify, Robinhood, Dropbox, Mailchimp and the San Francisco Symphony. While leading the west coast office, COLLINS was (thrice) consecutively named “Design Agency of the Year” by Ad Age (2019-2021) as well as one of the 50 Places Creative People Want to Work (source: Working / Not Working). In 2020, she helped launch COLLINS’s first-ever editorial site, IDEAS, while simultaneously spearheading the company’s internal DEI initiatives; helping to triple the impact of its internship program for creatively-inclined students of color.