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Independent design and branding agency Pearlfisher has chosen Jason Brown as the first global chief executive officer in its 32-year history to lead the firm as it makes plans for long-term growth.
Brown will be based in New York, where he will lead global business growth across both Pearlfisher studios in London and New York. The new leadership position lets Brown capitalize on his breadth of business experience in design and strategy to unite and lead the next phase of Pearlfisher.
“He stood head and shoulders above the other candidates, in that he had a real empathy for the creative and high-quality background that Pearlfisher has built its reputation on,” founding partner and group creative director Jonathan Ford told ADWEEK.
Brown comes to Pearlfisher from Godfrey Dadich Partners, where he was partner and president, leading the design agency’s East Coast business. With a design industry career spanning more than 25 years, Brown worked up to several head of design positions before achieving recognition as an accomplished industry speaker and business leader. He has worked at agencies including Interbrand and Fahrenheit 212, along with running his own agency, Dan + Jason + Co.
When Brown started his career, Pearlfisher was known as the standard of quality in the brand identity and packaging space. “This was the place that a lot of designers pointed to as where you go to start your design career,” Brown told ADWEEK.
Brown will work with the leadership teams in the New York and London studios to unlock future potential and adapt to evolving business needs. Ford and fellow founding partner and group chairman Mike Branson will support Brown as they continue in their respective business roles.
Expanding into new spaces
Pearlfisher has been at the forefront of the design game for three decades, having done award-winning work for clients including McDonald’s, General Mills (Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Gushers), Wild Turkey and alcohol-free brand Seedlip. While the company is international, there are opportunities for it to grow within its industry, which Brown hopes to capitalize on.
Brown sees prospects in the “tangential spaces that sit a little outside of our core value proposition and where the market is going to give us permission to actually stretch into.”
Those areas won’t be unfamiliar to the Pearlfisher team but are natural extensions of the business, which Brown sees as an unlocked value of the organization. They include product innovation and moving into the consulting space, delivering strategy, trend analysis, sustainability diagnostics and trend analysis.
As the agency looks to grow its business practices, it isn’t looking to grow its talent base much beyond its 110 employees.
“There is unlocked value in this organization that isn’t going to require us to add headcount in terms of growing what I would call a portfolio of products and services that the market is going to give us permission to deliver,” said Brown.
Pearlfisher will explore responsible growth while retaining its independence. It’s looking at possibly adding satellite offices where it makes good business sense, but that growth must be driven by client needs.
Ford noted that the agency works with clients in multiple foreign markets, including China, so there are opportunities to expand there and grow the agency’s reputation.
“Jason’s got a really good platform on which to take us into new exciting areas that we know we’re not currently in, in the same way that we’ve explored new exciting areas all the way through,” said Ford.
Addressing new trends and AI
Brown said that AI will impact, and potentially upend, the design industry, depending on the actual use of the software, platforms, tools and tactics. It can either represent a threat, or something that actually fortifies the work.
“It’s going to be important for us to, rather than sit back in a place of fear of the change, to embrace it immediately, get smart as quickly as we can, and figure out how it becomes a force multiplier for us versus something that we’re battling against,” said Brown.
Ford added that AI is having an influence on all creative industries, comparing its arrival to the rise of Mac technology when Pearlfisher first started. He sees another huge leap with AI but is cautious about the inherent risks, noting that humans should exercise their brains creatively rather than delegate to a machine or algorithm, which invites all the originality and copyright infringement problems that come with AI.
Ford said brands need to understand that the “real power of originality comes out of human imagination, and so we can harness the AI tools, but we can’t let them dictate the output.”
Ford continued that if you have an imaginative mind built on a solid strategic pathway, and you harness the power of AI, you then are able to combine artificial intelligence with intellectual and emotional intelligence to be powered by human imagination, which he calls “design intelligence.”
Pearlfisher will continue its growth plans while concentrating on retaining its high quality of design products for its many clients.
“What sits at the core of this business … is an ability here to define what’s desirable, to actually create products and environments and spaces and experiences that people desire. And for our clients, that equates to real economic impact,” said Brown.
