Together Group grows its agency line-up with stake acquisitions

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Feb 23, 2022

Together Group, a global collection of agencies focused on the luxury and lifestyle sectors, has announced the acquisition of “significant stakes” in five founder-led companies as it builds on its offer of full-service solutions for the design, tech, marketing, and communications needs of its clients.

The group already has a big link to the fashion sector but this latest move deepens that with the agencies announced today including Purple, King & Partners, Noë & Associates, Construct, and Hot Pot China.

So what do they all do? Well, Purple is a comms agency specialising in fashion, beauty, and luxury lifestyle, with offices in London, New York, LA, Miami, and Hong Kong. Its clients include Boss, Messika, LVMH, Richemont, DSquared2 and Maison Francis Kurkdjian, Ilia, fresh, Edition Hotels and Public Hotels.

New York-based King & Partners provides strategy, branding, creative, marketing and e-commerce services for brands such as, Neuehouse, Fotografiska, The Boca Raton, Brady Brand, Skims, and Auberge Resorts Collection. 

Noë & Associates is a brand strategy, design, content, and production agency focusing on architecture, design and the built environment with offices in London and New York. Its clients include Rolex, Mareterra, Related, Waldorf Astoria, and Neom.

Female-led creative consultancy and agency Construct has worked with Aman, Claridges, Frette and Harrods.

And Hot Pot China is a digital-marketing specialist with offices in London and Shanghai, developing and executing market strategies for clients in China, including Liberty, Fortnum & Mason, and La Perla.

While earlier expansion of its luxury platform was impacted by the pandemic, the company is clearly powering ahead with its interesting business model and Together Group CEO Dr Christian Kurtzke said: “We are building a truly diverse luxury-lifestyle agency group that celebrates a dynamic approach of combining synergistic agencies working in unison to deliver service excellence on a number of levels. Our model combines the benefits of leading-edge, founder-led agencies with the advantages of a larger, global organisation.”

The group's agencies will retain their own identities, cultures, and senior leadership teams. But the company said that “fully aligned as Together Group shareholders, they will drive collaboration across the group, providing more integrated, more creative solutions for our clients”.

“We have all the ingredients for significant organic growth as well as for attracting further high-quality agencies to selectively build out complementary service lines”, added Dr Kurtzke. 

Purple CEO Fergus Lawlor also said that “all the agency founders and their teams are committed to Together Group and its collaborative way of working for the long term. For us, it is not a means to an exit. We regard it as investment for Purple rather than a sale: we invested our agency into the group, and we are very excited to continue driving its growth”.