Grip Limited Toronto

Standing in a deserted, barren office space, looking out on the Ontario College of Art and Design, David Crichton, co-founder and partnercreative at Grip Limited, explains the plans for the new floor his agency has acquired; where the desks will go, where to put the staircase.

The nine-year-old company has been a huge success and the only way is up – literally. Crichton started Grip with a collective of other former creatives, MDs and agency owners after a prior client of Crichton’s asked if he would be willing to take on their business.

It turns out he was and that initial decision led to a whole bunch of clients asking the same question. Not long after the agency’s inception they were called by Bell, one of Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, who wanted to work with them. Grip were only 20 people strong at the time, but Crichton felt size wasn’t the problem, the client was; so he declined the offer.

So persistent was Bell, though, that Grip was asked to fly to Montreal and a deal was struck. “Bell was a tough, tough client,” smiles Crichton, “but we weathered that and we’ve been moving ahead and growing organically ever since. We weathered a lot of stuff,” he continues, “and while other agencies seem to have been hammered pretty hard, we continue to grow, maybe not as much in the recession but we’ve been doing pretty well.”

As well as they have been doing, it’s only recently that Grip decided to start entering award shows. When the agency started, a decision was made not to enter work unless the client expressly wished it – and paid for it. “Agencies have to charge more to pay for award show entries,” says Crichton, “and clients didn’t always know that.

Some clients like to enter awards shows, they recognise the benefit of them, as do we, and they wanted to enter work, so we said we’d look into it. We got back to them with the revised budget and it was $30,000 for a certain amount of work in a certain amount of shows.

They said that’s nuts and wouldn’t pay for it, and we said we wouldn’t either. We’re only now starting to enter shows, and we’re open about that, but we’re also really picky and judicious about it; it’s just too expensive.” Like a microcosm of Toronto, Grip is a vibrant and creative place to work.

The office itself is unusual and, like most agencies, has its share of boys’ toys – but Crichton is at pains to point out that they don’t have a games room and eschew “the airs of being cool and creative” in favour of simply having a great office environment. “We wanted it to feel like a fun environment and not just in that they’d get to play video games.

We wanted accessibility; we didn’t want a car division, a digital division or an account services department. We wanted everyone mixed in together – and we have the slide, of course, and the fire pole.” The slide isn’t some sort of euphemism, it’s an actual slide that goes from one floor down to the next. There’s even a cracked desk a few metres from the mouth of the slide where an over-enthusiastic employee failed to slow themselves in time.

“The idea of the slide,” continues Crichton, “is for people to get from this floor to that floor fast. It gets used a lot. It’s an interesting and vibrant place to work.” That vibrancy is reflected in the people who work at Grip, explains Crichton, who says that if you’re driven and proactive then Grip is a perfect place to further your career.

With regards the current creative might of Canada, Crichton is fairly positive, if hesitant to be too gushing. “I think Canada is pretty creative,” he states. “I hesitate when I say that because we have meetings here where we think, ‘Jeez, the work sucks, we’ve got to make it better’. We’re really hard on ourselves and have a really bad habit of...” Crichton tails off as he searches for the right words.

“America really promotes its own,” he continues, “it applauds successes and praises good work, whereas in Canada, instead of saying ‘holy shit, good for them’, we’d rather pull [people] down. So it’s tough to do good creative work here and have it recognised as such. But I think there’s a lot of good stuff here. Could it be better? Absolutely!”