Five former employees of Madwell, the debt-saddled indie agency whose various controversies led to its collapse in late April, have been tapped to form Gravity One, a millennial and Gen Z-focused division within the full-service agency Gravity Global, ADWEEK has learned. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Gravity One will be helmed by Charlie Smith and Devin Kharpertian. Smith, who was a strategy leader at Madwell, will serve as managing director of client services, while Kharpertian, a former Madwell creative lead, has been appointed managing director of creative.
Three other ex-Madwell employees have joined as part of the founding leadership team: Julia Goldsmith, JP Summers, and Alex Kaufman, who will respectively lead production, strategy, and creative.
Both Smith and Kharpertian told ADWEEK it was important to them to keep the group together and build on the work they accomplished together at Madwell. It plans to bring on additional talent in the coming weeks.
The shop will offer a range of services across five major practice areas: creative, strategy, client services, production, and design. It will act as an independent branch within the larger Gravity Global, which operates more than a dozen offices across the U.S., U.K., and China, and counts Honda, Airbus, and United Healthcare among its clients.
“We’re confident we can take on any kind of industry full-service work with those disciplines,” Smith said. It will focus specifically on “the next generation of consumers and audiences, and reaching them in unique and non-traditional ways.”
This is a key focus area for Gravity Global, whose president, Jose Lozano, is betting that the new talent will bring expertise to the millennial and Gen Z segments. The ex-Madwell employees, Lozano said, have “spent their careers targeting this segment that is incredibly powerful and growing extremely fast.”