HEADQUARTERS: Irvine, with offices in San Diego and Chicago
AGENCY IN A NUTSHELL: Brand building, e-commerce, digital products for client roster that includes Vizio, HyperX, Nike, McDonald’s, TaylorMade and T-Mobile among others.
LATEST NEWS: Company this month consolidated its agency brands—Envoy, Bulldog Drummond and Leviathan—under the single name of Envoy; agency now has more than 110 employees, with an expectation the company could hire close to 20% of its headcount over the next six months based on second-half demand.
Also recently went in with Newport Beach-based Innovate Partners to start a $10 million fund, called Envoy Ventures to invest in digital direct-to-consumer brands. The investment arm has so far invested in air-conditioning company Kapsul, Kopari Beauty and UV-C light cleaning company Violux. Envoy Ventures is looking to do between two to four deals annually.
“We don’t do it with every one of our clients and it’s not meant to be a way to attract meaningful, new business. We are looking at doing deals where we feel it’s the right way to show a deeper level of commitment to those management teams,” explained Bauer of Envoy Ventures.
Envoy’s projecting revenue growth in the range of 20% to 30%.
ON DIGITAL: “There’s still a bit of bifurcation in the market, but I would say that management teams, C-suites of more established or enterprise scale companies or owner-founder operators of aggressively growing start-ups, there’s a category of them. We call them ‘future minded.’ For those leaders and how they see this connected customer experience, there’s so many touchpoints for when a targeted customer is using a product or a service in today’s economy. A lot of that proliferation is coming digitally for how many ways we interact. Last year what we saw was an acceleration of the use of the internet, particularly e-commerce. So with a mindset of future business model-oriented leaders that are trying to think about how to really connect with and maximize that customer experience across all these different touchpoints, we feel like that’s the wave.”
ON CONSOLIDATION: “Showing up under multiple brands [as an agency] is disingenuous. We are one, unified entity delivering impact in the best way possible. It’s not about maintaining a perception of brand IP or ego across disparate brands. We don’t measure success that way.
I think we are seeing consolidation and we’re seeing consolidation around the themes that we’re talking about in that you don’t build a website or commerce platform or mobile app just for the fun of it without a strategic direction.”
–Kari Hamanaka
