Toronto creative shop The Garden has boosted its design cred with the appointment of Omar Morson as design director.
Morson, a designer with more than 16 years experience for agencies like Anomaly, Oxygen and most recently Zulu Alpha Kilo, started with The Garden April 4.
The need for a design director sprung from The Garden’s focus on creating strong customer experiences for its client brands rather than defaulting to advertising, said Shane Ogilvie, the creative who launched The Garden early in 2015 with Shari Walczak, the lead on the strategy side of the business.
“We are not against advertising, but it is not a predetermined output for us,” he said. “We think creativity is a lot more powerful than that.”
Since launching just over a year ago, The Garden has grown its client roster to include Tbooth Wireless, Wirelesswave, Scene, Standard Innovation, Asurion, IZ Fashion and The United Way.
Ogilvie attributes the first-year successes to clients’ rising interest in creative partners that start with a deep dive into strategy rather than trying to produce advertising to fill a media buy. “We do a lot of digging up front to make sure the problem we are solving is the problem [the client] needs to solve,” he said.
A client may need a new logo or brand identity, packaging or retail redesign or even a new product design—bringing Morson on board helps The Garden with all of that, said Ogilvie.
“So as we start to approach a client’s problems, the solution may be advertising or something completely different but it typically requires some kind of visual solution.”
Ogilvie said Morson has an impressive resume that includes the Budweiser Red Light and is a good cultural fit—the two are familiar with each other from a short stint working together at ZAK. But, Ogilvie said he’s also impressed with Morson’s “old school” attention to detail and passion for the fundamental skills that go into the craft of design that many younger designers are uninterested in.
The hiring of Morson follows the appointment of Dic Dickerson as managing director in late January.
“Joining The Garden was a great opportunity to help build a new agency approach from the ground up,” said Dickerson in a release. “I really like being a part of something new and fresh, where you’re encouraged to look at things differently, and provide creative solutions that aren’t influenced by historic disciplines.”
