Jake Baldridge
Founder & Strategist
After spending the first part of his career working on diverse global brands, Jake founded Nacho Industries in 2012 to focus on his love of asking questions, understanding what makes people tick and figuring out how companies can motivate the unique individuals they serve.
Since then, Jake has had the opportunity to develop brand strategies and uncover insights for some pretty great brands in highly unusual places — from collaboratively designing healthy services in rural Illinois to huddling in a rainy Moscow parking lot to better understand Russian SUV owners. Whether it’s food and beverage, tech, pharma or automotive, Jake loves the opportunity to dive into a new category and help clients reach their business goals.
Before he came to insights and strategy, Jake wanted to be a naval architect, an English professor and a professional cook. Working in this field seems to have satisfied all three ambitions.
Kristina Baldridge
Partner & Strategist
With nearly 15 years of marketing and communications experience, Kristina blends brand strategy expertise with her deep curiosity about the ways brands and their consumers interact. Regardless of the project, she works to find ways to create meaningful connections between companies and people in today’s noisy, digital world.
Recently, she’s had the opportunity to help reposition America’s largest ISP and found a way to humanize an elite financial brand struggling to connect with a new target audience. But whether it’s high net-worth investing, ancient art or technology, Kristina loves the opportunity to partner with a client and find the unexpected insight that can truly move the needle.
Before moving into brand strategy and research, Kristina was a senior vice president at Prosek Partners, developing communications strategies and reputation management programs for global financial firms including Goldman Sachs, Ally Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and OppenheimerFunds.
