Lou Patterson, Founder

Lou has 30+ years experience in sales, marketing and operations on the client side, working in lifestyle consumer brands. For almost 15 years, Lou managed Category One operations across projects and guided the development of methodologies. Lou loves finding solutions to problems and helping clients connect with their customers in a deep and meaningful way.

Sara Higginbottom, Strategist

With over 10 years of experience working with some of the nation’s most recognizable brands, Sara is a strategist, researcher, and consumer insights professional driven by an insatiable curiosity for understanding what makes people tick and the why behind consumer decisions. She thrives on challenging conventions, delivering actionable and thought-provoking insights, and developing creative brand strategies. Sara believes that successful brand and marketing strategies are rooted in a deep understanding of the consumer and strives to bring their wants and needs to the surface in order to lay the foundation for business decisions.  

Before starting her own strategic marketing business, Sara was an account planner in the insight and strategy department at The Integer Group, working in brand and shopper marketing, and a marketing coordinator at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, running their CRM program. She has an MBA with a focus in strategic marketing communications from the University of Denver and a BA in sociology, anthropology, and psychology from Colgate University. 

Carla Ooyen, Quantitative Researcher

Carla is an independent market research consultant with 15 years of experience using her quantitative skills to go beyond bland charts to capturing the actionable insights.  She enjoys tying an industry’s story to its data and has worked with clients in a wide array of industries, including natural products, dietary supplements, cannabis/hemp CBD, genomics, and other consumer products sectors.

Carla has extensive experience conducting surveys across the value chain from consumers to retailers, manufacturers, suppliers, practitioners and research scientists. She is also skilled at developing market size estimates based on incomplete information, using both the art and the science of market research. She enjoys piecing together disparate nuggets of information to build a picture of an industry, understanding the importance of qualitative insights to help build quantitative models.

Prior to founding Ooyen Research, LLC in 2014, Carla spent six years honing her market research and strategy skills with Nutrition Business Journal and New Hope Natural Media as their Director of Market Research. 

Carla holds an MBA from the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. Before becoming a market researcher, she still analyzed data and trends as an architectural engineer. 

Kim Johnson, Filmmaker

Kim is a thinker and a filmmaker. She has been a producer and documentary filmmaker for over 20 years. Her collaborative, naturalistic production approach sets her subjects at ease and results in films that convey poignant information, fresh thinking, and incisive observations which resonate powerfully with viewers. 

After receiving her BA from Duke University and MA from Stanford University in documentary film production, Kim’s career has included working as an ethnographic filmmaker/strategist for Interval Research, founded by Paul Allen of Microsoft as well as in television at CNN, BBC, PBS, and NBC Sports on a variety of international productions, including an Emmy-nominated film on Mt. Everest, with blind climber, Erik Weihenmayer, and team. 

Kim has extensive agency experience as senior producer and filmmaker at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, where she applied her engaging filmmaking approach to qualitative market research projects for clients including Microsoft, Domino’s, Volkswagen, Best Buy and Coca Cola. Prior to CP+B, she worked at Radar Communications and engaged on projects with Levi Strauss, Starbucks, Toyota, and Herman Miller amongst others. Her most recent project portfolio includes Noodles&Co, Whole Foods Market, adidas, New Hope Networks and other clients in the health and wellness industries where Kim is continually working to capture relevant topics and communicate meaningful issues in the natural products industry development and growth. 

We also regularly work with expert videographers, recruiters and quantitative consultants hand selected for each unique project.

Troy Mault, Controller

Troy is a numbers guy, so naturally he isn’t quick to send us words for his bio. But here’s the deal; as “idea people” we would be sunk without the steady hand and holistic business approach of Troy behind the scenes. He has kept this business (and many others) running for over 24 years, including five years as Controller of Radar Communications (Category One predecessor). And thank goodness for that!

We also regularly work with expert videographers, recruiters and quantitative consultants hand selected for each unique project.