Droga5 Bolsters Creative And Design Departments

Today, Droga5 New York announces four new hires and two promotions in the agency’s growing Creative and Design Departments.

Brandon Pierce and Amee Shah join the agency as Group Creative Directors, while Dino Sanchez and Anna Fine join as Executive Designer Director and Design Director, respectively.

The agency also promoted two of its resident designers; Rich Greco and Devin Croda have been elevated to Group Design Directors. The hires and promotions follow steady agency growth and several new business wins, including ESPN, IHOP restaurants and Tencent, among others. 

 

Pierce joins Droga5 from 72andSunny New York, where he was one of the first employees to set up the agency’s East Coast presence. As a writer and creative director, he spent close to four years helping mold the office’s culture, while crafting award-winning campaigns for Smirnoff and Samsung. Pierce also helped lead a successful pitch for Cîroc and guided creative 

assignments for ESPN and Adidas. Prior to 72andSunny, he had stints at Sid Lee and Wieden + Kennedy Portland and collected a number of Cannes Lions, Clios, One Show Pencils and additional hardware along the way. 

 

"I’ve always admired Droga5’s creatively ambitious spirit. I look forward to learning from and working with fearless people who are down to make the insane a reality,” says Brandon Pierce. 

 

Having spent several years consulting and freelancing at some of the best agencies in the world, Amee Shah joins Droga5 as Group Creative Director with over 20 years of experience building global brands. 

 

Formerly a Global Creative Director and board member at BBH New York, Shah was responsible for creating some of the agency’s most iconic work, including award-winning work for Axe, Levi’s, Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, and Sprite. Prior to BBH, Shah was an Art Director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, helping launch the MINI Cooper in the U.S. She also held creative posts at McKinney & Silver, Kirshenbaum and Bond and Ammirati Puris Lintas. 

 

“I’ve been lucky to work for incredible people and at incredible places in my career. To be able to join Droga5 and work alongside so many insanely talented people who are doing incredible work is a no-brainer,” says Amee Shah. 

 

Dino Sanchez joins Droga5 as Executive Design Director with expertise that spans branding; experience; furniture and graphic, interior and industrial design. 

 

Sanchez began his career as an industrial designer, which eventually led him to the Birsel + Seck studio. Under the mentorship of Ayse Birsel and Bibi Seck, he honed his design sensibility and understanding of beautiful forms, developing products for Herman Miller, HP, Renault, Toyota and a roster of celebrated furniture brands. 

 

The next phase of his career saw him join the global design and strategy firm frog design. There, Sanchez leveraged frog's expertise in holistic design, contextualizing his work in the realm of brand, strategy and customer experience. Over his six-year tenure, he led the industrial and experience design groups in the New York office and built strategic and creative visions for clients including Comcast, ABInBev, Verizon, GE, FEMA and Equinox. 

 

With a broader view across design, Sanchez expanded his craft by joining the hospitality and interior design firm AvroKO, where he led and established the vision of their brand division, Brand Bureau. As Managing Director and Creative Director, he grew the studio into a full-service brand agency, working in interiors, brand, strategy and hospitality development. 

 

“Throughout my career, I've maintained the belief that design is a vastly powerful tool, one that can have a profound impact on how we perceive ourselves, the world around us and our relationships with one another. I'm incredibly excited to join Droga5, a creative agency that delivers on this belief, time after time, in stellar ways,” says Dino Sanchez. 

 

Anna Fine joins Droga5 as a Design Director from R/GA, where she worked on Verizon’s new products as well as the agency’s startup accelerator, R/GA Ventures. 

 

Fine graduated with honors from the School of Visual Arts as a double major in advertising and graphic design. After college, she landed at Anomaly, where she worked as an Art Director on Google. Fine left the advertising world and joined Google Creative Lab’s 30 Weeks, a program that teaches designers how to become founders. She decided to pursue her newfound love of product design and development and freelanced as a Creative Director and Product Designer for VC incubators and startups. 

 

Out the office, Fine teaches digital design and ecosystems at her alma mater, SVA. She recently won Pixels of Fury 2017, giving her the new title of Photoshop (S)layer. 

 

“Droga5 has always been full of future thinkers, and the result is an agency full of smart, optimistic people continually escalating what constitutes original and innovative creative work,” says Anna Fine. “I look forward to participating in and executing the ‘next generation’ of work as we continue to redefine the parameters of our offerings and the impact they have.”