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.”
