Stories from the “COVID Years” featuring Canadian women business owners often highlight pivots, resilience, downsizing, and reinvention - sometimes even closure. Rarely do they include the word “start-up.”
For Tanya Humphrey and Nicolle Cowan, 2021 marked the moment they chose to launch a new venture: HelloInfo. Their careers began in academic librarianship before evolving into senior roles at an international consulting firm focused on strategic research, competitive intelligence, and customer insights. It was during a flight home from a prestigious client meeting that they made the decision to apply their combined expertise - spanning industries from healthcare and financial services to technology, consumer goods, and logistics - to building their own specialized insights solution. That decision became the foundation of HelloInfo.
Providing boutique solutions for competitive intelligence, customer insights, and corporate strategy, HelloInfo delivers custom research centered on the external forces shaping its clients’ businesses. Distinctively, the firm focuses on generating primary insights beyond what is available online and via LLMs, leveraging original research and expert engagement to deliver clients a richer, more differentiated perspective that their competitors do not have. At the heart of its offering is “approachable intelligence,” translating complex findings into digestible, engaging outputs that help clients act with clarity and confidence.
From a “what if” conversation on a flight between San Francisco and Toronto, HelloInfo has grown into a firm delivering major projects for global leaders such as Amazon, Microsoft, Shopify, Morgan Stanley, Autodesk, and Philips. The team, now eight full-time members including co-founders Tanya and Nicolle, operates within a predominantly remote and highly flexible family-oriented model. While Toronto- based, the group maintains strong connection through daily virtual check-ins, monthly in-person meetings, and an annual tradition of travelling together to a different Canadian city, so far including Regina, Halifax, and Montreal, with St. John’s, Newfoundland scheduled this spring.
Now celebrating five years of growth, HelloInfo also marks five years as a WBE Canada-certified business. While Tanya and Nicolle credit much of their business success to word-of-mouth, being certified with WBE Canada has opened up incredible avenues to meet other women-owned businesses and make connections with corporate organizations and their teams. But as a diverse supplier in their own right, HelloInfo is also a champion and advocate of inclusivity within the marketplace as a whole. As a company that is diverse-owned, diverse-led, and diverse-operated, HelloInfo has also embedded DEI in their client engagements and are vocal about advocating for broader representation in competitor, customer, and market research.
As a member of the WBE Canada community, with connections to supplier inclusion champions across Canada and globally, HelloInfo’s philosophy of diversity, ethics and inclusion that is embedded in their daily business practices and behavior is definitely sending a clear message. In a world dominated by AI, volatile markets, rapidly changing consumer trends, and abundantly- flourishing research tools fueled by search strings and algorithms, adding a customized analytical layer to the process of defining and re-defining a corporate strategy is what results in HelloInfo client success.
HelloInfo, by combining customer, competitor, and market insights provides the clarity clients need to answer their complex questions with confidence.
Learn more about HelloInfo: www.helloinfo.global
Learn more about WBE Canada Certification: www.wbecanada.ca/certification
