Remo Kommnick, '12

Since Remo Kommnick, ’12, arrived at the University of Richmond in 2008 as a first-year student from Germany, he has proved that modern business need not be a matter of crunching numbers behind a desk, but is instead an enterprise in crossing borders.

Attracted by the strong reputation of the Robins School of Business and UR’s offer of a full scholarship, Kommnick initially planned to study international business. However, a Principles of Microeconomics class with Jonathan Wight shifted his interest to economics.

“I learned much more than economics,” notes Kommnick. Wight “pointed out the combination of individual, social and ethical implications in economic concepts that forced [me] to think outside the box.” He found the University’s interdisciplinary curriculum to be particularly helpful, since “it doesn’t focus on purely business or just the arts.”

In this vein, Kommnick united his Chinese minor with his economics major and, supported by University funds, enrolled in three programs abroad: summer study at Peking University in Beijing, a second summer at National Chengchi University in Taiwan and a semester at the University of Hong Kong.

“Chinese is an outlet for creativity,” says Kommnick. “It’s art in its purest sense.” While developing his language skills, he also grappled with the more quantitative, profit-driven environment he encountered in Hong Kong.

There, he says, “the focus was ‘how do we teach you how to make money.’ At Richmond, we try to get a whole person out of the students.”

Creativity is a significant preoccupation of Kommnick. As former president of UR’s Entrepreneurship Club two years running, he has overseen the growth of the annual Business Pitch Competition from 20 pitches and a prize of $2,500 to more than 30 teams and a prize of $5,000. The goal of this competition is less the financial success of a pitch; instead, he explains, “we’re trying to provide a learning experience in which we teach people how to think.”

Kommnick is no stranger to business ventures. Three years ago, he and a friend founded imprvd., an international web-consulting and media design firm based in France that has since grown to a team of five. Their first client was an architecture studio owned by the father of one of Kommnick’s friends in Germany. Employing a three-platform web, print and mobile approach, they leveraged this job into work for some 20 clients from eight countries, on projects such as rebranding hotels in Montreal and Gettysburg and designing signage concepts for the Budapest airport.

The Montreal hotel originally commissioned Kommnick’s firm to redesign its logo and business card. However, the team quickly realized the need for a more comprehensive strategy and went on to design a host of printed materials, overhaul the hotel’s website, and, realizing that today’s young urbanites are more likely to book rooms using smartphones, develop a mobile site to facilitate reservations.

“We only serve a small number of clients, but we serve them really, really well,” says Kommnick. “Every single one of our products is unique.”

This past summer, Kommnick accepted a job as a YouTube online media solutions intern at Google’s European headquarters in Dublin. In this position, he developed and launched the headquarters’ first corporate YouTube channel and was selected to participate in a weeklong marketing project in Mountain View, Calif., that focused on female-owned businesses.

With a year left at UR, Kommnick sees himself working in various countries in the foreseeable future.

“Thanks to my experiences studying abroad, I feel well prepared to work in a number of international environments,” he says. He hopes to continue working in mobile, local and social businesses.