Grizzly: The Brand Transformation Agency Guiding Brands Onward

^{L-R, Kelsey Carter, Nate Spees, Greg Gibson}

When Grizzly opened its doors in 2013, the agency wasn’t launched with grand proclamations about reinventing advertising. Instead, it was built around two simple ideas:

• Agency + client experiences are changing. The next generation of independent agencies would challenge holding company dominance and you wouldn’t need a Manhattan address or a global network to do impactful, global work. What you needed was smart strategy, brave creativity, and an intimate agency–brand relationship.
• Brand + consumer experiences are changing. The next generation of brand experiences would look different – more digital, more integrated, and driven by a brand’s purpose at scale. Especially in technology, these brands needed a way to define what they stand for and then translate that belief into a memorable brand experience for their audience.

At the time of Grizzly’s founding, digital branding was still catching up to the web itself. The space was dominated by templated solutions, functional but soulless. Brands struggled to translate their identity online, often settling for what platforms allowed rather than what their vision required. Founders Greg Gibson and Nate Spees saw an opening, not in the code, but in the space between brand strategy and digital experience.

What began as a focus on UX, UI, and digital experience quickly became something more foundational: an upstream partner helping brands align identity and expression from the inside out. Grizzly’s early work established a model that emphasised deep collaboration with internal teams, not transactional execution. And that orientation, toward brand belief and purpose, has remained central to its evolution.

Grizzly's shift from digital builders to strategic brand partners didn’t happen by accident, it was a response to real needs in the market. “It became obvious that the best-performing work didn’t start at the interface,” says Nate. “It started upstream, with brand clarity. Why do you exist? Who is it for? And what future are you helping to build?”

That philosophy laid the foundation for Onward, Grizzly’s proprietary brand transformation framework. Onward isn’t about surface-level repositioning – it’s about orientation, strategy, and activation. A system designed to help brands codify their purpose, architect a new narrative, and scale that story across everything they do: from go-to-market to product design to internal culture.

Over the last decade, Grizzly has applied that framework to brands at every stage of growth, from emerging ventures defining their voice for the first time to enterprise organisations rethinking their role in the world.

For high-growth fitness tech company Future, that upstream clarity was mission-critical. As the company scaled, it needed a narrative that could stretch across audiences, platforms, and moments, without losing its soul. Grizzly led the charge, developing the brand platform ‘Here We Go’, a strategic narrative that fused optimism, ambition, and grit into a single idea.

This wasn’t just messaging. ‘Here We Go’ became a cultural operating system for the brand, shaping product decisions, marketing language, internal onboarding, and ultimately, Future’s merger with Tom Brady’s Autograph company. It was a full-spectrum expression of Grizzly’s belief: that a brand isn’t what it says, it’s what it stands for.

In the B2B enterprise space, Grizzly has carved out a reputation for translating technical depth into emotional resonance. Their work with Samsara is a prime example. Faced with a sprawling product suite and a rapidly growing customer base, Samsara needed more than a new look, they needed a new lens. Grizzly delivered ‘Make More Possible’, a unifying brand idea that redefined Samsara’s value as an enabler of human potential, not just operational efficiency.

Similarly, for Darktrace, a global cybersecurity company, Grizzly launched the brand platform ‘Defend Beyond’, a narrative repositioning that shifted the conversation from fear-based messaging to proactive, intelligence-driven protection. This platform elevated the brand above the noise and aligned it with a forward-looking security ethos.

And for Zscaler, a long-term partnership has included brand system evolution and storytelling architecture that help the company bridge internal teams and external stakeholders, ensuring the brand shows up with consistency and conviction across global markets.

While much of Grizzly’s work lives in enterprise and emerging tech, the agency has also collaborated with global consumer brands like Google. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Grizzly partnered with Google's Education and Kids & Families teams to rethink how the company spoke to parents, educators, and young users in an unprecedented time. The result was a sensitive, story-led content suite that married Google’s core voice with new channels of empathy and engagement.

These examples illustrate Grizzly’s range, but more importantly, they highlight a consistent throughline: clarity before complexity, partnership over production, and transformation over tactics.

As artificial intelligence reshapes the agency landscape, Grizzly hasn’t been caught flat-footed. The team has leaned into AI tools like MidJourney, Runway, and Gemini, not to replace its creative process, but to accelerate and sharpen it. From input-side research to output-side iteration, AI is helping Grizzly move faster and dig deeper, without compromising on originality or craft.

“We still believe in the middle,” Greg says. “That place where creativity meets judgment. Where strategy becomes story. AI gets us there faster, but it doesn’t do the work for us.”

That belief in human-centred creativity remains Grizzly’s anchor. It’s why its work resonates, not as noise in the feed, but as meaning in the market.

Grizzly’s model, boutique, embedded, and idea-led, has found traction with brands that aren’t afraid to think differently. The agency’s podcast, ‘Adventurous CMO’, explores that ethos with guests who are navigating change with courage and creativity. It’s a fitting companion to Grizzly’s positioning line: ‘Brave ideas for adventurous brands’.

But that line isn’t just a tagline. It’s a filter. “We work with brands that are shaping what’s next,” says Nate. “The ones willing to take a stand, take a risk, and put something original into the world. That’s who we’re for. That’s who we build with.”

Grizzly doesn’t measure success by awards or accolades. The real metric is resonance: Did the work make the brand clearer, stronger, more memorable? Did it help a team align, a company grow, a story land?

Its approach is less about being everywhere, and more about being essential, showing up at pivotal moments to help brands tackle change and move forward with clarity and conviction. Because that’s how you guide brands onward.