Kansas City, Missouri-based advertising agency Barkley announced that long-time partner agency Grenadier in Boulder, Colorado, will become an official part of the Barkley brand. Barkley made the structural change to attract talent and streamline its creative process.

Founded as a Barkley partner agency in 2012, Grenadier started as a strategic and creative boutique agency focused on emerging brands. Today, the team in Boulder has evolved into a more seamless extension of Barkley, working on several of the agency’s key clients such as Bass Pro Shops and Thrivent Financial. 

“I’m excited for our team to be able to work on big, important brand problems faster than we could as a stand-alone agency, and to have the support and depth that our Kansas City office brings us,” said Jeff Graham, SVP, managing director at Barkley (formerly the managing director at Grenadier).

In the new structure, creative, strategy, account, and production teams will report to a company-wide lead regardless of office location. The goal for the restructuring is to allow Barkley to deliver the right team at the right time for clients big or small. Grenadier’s leadership will remain in place. In addition to Graham, Grenadier partners Wade Paschall and Randy Rogers will be taking on roles as VPs/group creative directors at Barkley. 

The shift also opens up Barkley to a vast pool of talent in the Denver/Boulder area, which has a high concentration of startups and a culture of innovation. Advertising people frequently move to Colorado  for one of the dominant agencies and stay because of the lifestyle. Barkley hopes to emerge as another viable destination for those people.

Barkley has more than 400 employees on staff. Grenadier now operates as Barkley and will maintain its current office location and team with future plans for growth.

“The agency with the best people wins—and our job is to get an unfair share of great talent,” says Jeff King, CEO at Barkley, “We believe expanding the Barkley footprint to include Boulder helps us achieve that.”