Incentive Magazine highlights The SuperGroup’s unusual take on employee downtime:

Motivation in Action: Time Off to Rock
May 12, 2009
By Kassia Shishkoff

When the employees at SuperGroup take time out from work during the day, they don’t gather at the coffee station or the water cooler to chat. Instead they gather in the storage room for a jam session.

Okay, so not everyone plays music—others write screenplays or make short films—but the three founders and about 85 percent of the staff do. Chris Wallace, one of the founding partners of the Atlanta-based graphic design and interactive development firm, plays keyboards.

“We kind of fell into it because we’re all musicians,” says Wallace of himself and his co-founders, Gabe Aldridge and Brad Lewis. “We encourage everybody to have side projects. The only real [criterion] is that they have to be creative in some respect.”

At almost every job employees have downtime, Wallace explains, but rather than use it to browse the Internet or chat online, the workers at SuperGroup keep their creativity flowing with projects or hobbies. This keeps them from burning out on whatever they’re doing for work, according to Wallace.

“Keeping our creative muscles flexed is a really big concern here,” says Wallace. “We try and come up with as many ways as possible so people don’t get into a rut where they’re not really producing. We demand a lot out of them creatively, so it’s our responsibility to put them in an environment where they can flourish in that respect.”

Not only are the breaks enjoyable for everyone, says Wallace, but they also increase productivity.

“We noticed that when we spent some time focusing on music and activities or anything to creatively get our mind off the task at hand, when we finally came back to that task the work was exponentially better,” says Wallace.

All this takes place in the big storage room at SuperGroup. All the music equipment is kept there, and people are allowed to make messes with paints and other craft supplies. The room is far from SuperGroup’s neighbors because, according to Wallace, it can get pretty loud in there.

No SuperGroup employees are ever told to take time off work when it could be detrimental to their projects, but if someone isn’t making headway, says Wallace, that person is encouraged to take a break and come back to it later. One time the whole group was having trouble with a project so Wallace took everyone to see a movie to take their minds off it.

“Quality of work is the most important thing,” says Wallace. “Where we really want to stand out is that we do the best work in the world.”

At SuperGroup, turnover is relatively nonexistent, according to Wallace. Employees are generally there to stay, and they strive to keep it that way. In addition to their daily creative breaks, the group goes on a trip to Disney World each year.

“We try to give back to them to let them know we appreciate that dedication,” says Wallace. “Even though they might work very hard, they’re happy to be doing it.”

Read “Time Off to Rock”

Modern Luxury Media magazine, The Atlantan, featured The SuperGroup partners in “THE RADAR | BIZ” section of their May/June issue:

| By Felicia Feaster | Portrait by Sarah Dorio |

In 2002, three clever, computer-savvy Gen Xers – Chris Wallace, Gabe Aldridge, and Brad Lewis – with a techie bent and plenty of time spent rocking out in local bands, founded the Web and interactive-focused creative shop The SuperGroup. The first year, Wallace jokes, their revenue stream was “zero.” Their creative epicenter was Aldridge’s College Park bungalow, where meetings were held around his grandmother’s dining room table. But Wallace says The SuperGroup now competes with renowned agencies such as New York’s TBWA, the Grey Group and TribalDDB. “That’s not to say they know who we are. But they are certainly losing business to us,” Wallace laughs. Projected earnings for 2009 are $3.2 million, and this June the group launches its first global endeavor, funded through the Wiliam and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Surfing the wave of China-chic, The SuperGroup has helped develop an instructional language program called The Forgotten World that will allow students in China’s rural Gansu province to learn English through an inventive mix of pop culture, games and comics.

Today the innovative creative agency boasts a staff of 12 and a reputation for expertly tapping into the techie trends that make the Twitter and Facebook generation buzz. With its fingers on the hot buttons of interactivity and social networking, The SuperGroup has managed to laser-train its indie smarts. It’s even taken mundane or smirk-worthy hygiene products and talking-about-the-weather and made them look hip in irreverent Web and package designs for companies like Johnson & Johnson and The Weather Channel. Displaying an anarchic sensibility that evokes Monty Python, Dadaist collage and YouTube viral video, the group’s oddball, highly entertaining approach is typified by a recent Kimberly-Clark Web project for Wypall Wipes with the offbeat feel of a Coen Brothers film. Though they’ve demonstrated their ability to hook blue chip companies like Coca-Cola and Disney, The SuperGroup hasn’t lost its hipster spirit or an awareness of the cultural zeitgeist that keeps the Fortune 500 crowd knocking. Like the teenage son who keeps his cool-hunting dad aware of the hippest iTunes downloads, The SuperGroup entices old school companies with its ability to tap into cutting-edge trends that give its work that special balance of novelty and authenticity.

All three founders keep current by rocking out in local bands and embracing an eccentric staff, including a performance artist named Dance Buffet, a screenwriter, and an indie record label owner. And instead of some gleaming corporate tower, The SuperGroup’s peculiar brand of fan boy cool is perhaps best epitomized by its Krog street digs; an office-slash-play zone featuring an interior design by ai3 (www.ai3online.com) that looks straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey or some swinging sixties Carnegie Street pad. Tricked out with Crush soda orange chairs and bottles of boozing options, from absinthe to rye whiskey, the space reflects the trio’s desire to play grown-up on their own terms. “We want this place to be an oasis,” says Aldridge. “It’s a home for failed rock stars. We offer an attractive plan B.”

Read “Wonder Boys, Activate” on Page 50