Creative agency Joan has gone on a hiring frenzy, bringing on 30 new employees in junior and executive roles. The spree nearly doubles the headcount of the agency and comes after a year of new business wins.

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The new hires bring the total number of employees to 64—and there are at least nine positions still open. The new employees will help the agency service 11 new accounts the agency racked up this year, including Dr. Scholl’s, Sheetz, Icelandic Provisions, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Google.org, Shift and eBay Parts and Accessories. The agency said it is unable to disclose the remainder of its new wins, but said it was successful in 11 out of 12 pitches this year and has already achieved 90% of its growth goal for next year.

The new additions to the team include three leadership, 14 creative, eight account, strategy and management and five production roles. 

Mike Reuter, former group business director at Anomaly, has joined Joan as group account director, while Shrivika Jain also becomes group account director, joining from Big Spaceship, where she held the same role. Kristin Van Note was freelancing prior to joining Joan as the new group strategy director. The agency has also filled roles such as project and creative manager, senior art director, senior and junior copywriter, among others. 

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'Thrilling and daunting'

"It’s really thrilling and it’s also really daunting,” said Jamie Robinson, co-founder and chief creative officer at Joan. “Because when you bring that many people on, you also have to get them in and get them indoctrinated into our way of doing things, and our year has been so exciting so that’s the reason behind all of this.”

There have also been recent changes at Joan in top creative posts. Last year, Lauren Costa was hired on as executive creative director after Dan Lucey left the agency to join Havas New York as chief creative officer. Abe Baginsky also signed on as executive creative director in June after freelancing for the agency.

Joan, which was founded in 2016, attributes the growth in part to its recent philosophy, which it describes as “Let’s do less, but let’s do better." But both Robinson and Lisa Clunie, co-founder and CEO of Joan, also credit the recent win streak to Joan's proprietary process it calls the “growth wheel.”

The founders describe it as a wheel with "wedges like a pizza” that helps clients balance brand-building and modernity.  “[The wedges] are things that every agency has been using since the dawn of time, because they work,” Clunie said. “‘Who you are,’ ‘show up,’ ‘invest properly,’ those kinds of things. And on the left side of the wheel are the things that drive modern adoption by culture and staying at the beat of the moment.”

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Added Clunie: “It’s a strategy tool, an operating tool, it’s a hiring tool."