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Grit Doesn’t Do Timesheets — It Does 35 Rounds (if Needed)
The Denver design-led shop trades billable hours for flat fees, 5 p.m. exits and as many rounds as the work needs
Sean Topping, founder and creative director of Grit, has run the Denver shop independently for about 14 years. It started in 2012 as a two-person partnership — an art director and a copywriter — that landed on its name while working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Today Grit is a 10-person, design-led agency with a sharp niche in consumer packaged goods, recently wrapping work for Conagra’s Fatty Meat Stick. Most of its clients live outside Colorado, and plenty of them first met Grit through a package redesign before handing over the full campaign.
The pitch is simple. “We don’t do timesheets ever,” Topping says.
Fourteen years in, that line still does most of the talking.
A name that started as a compromise
Topping and his co-founder couldn’t agree on a name. At the time they were helping the Gates Foundation launch online schools for low-income kids, and one word kept surfacing in the work: grit — the idea that students need perseverance, not just memorization, to push through.
“It sort of started as that was the only name that we could both agree on,” Topping says. “But more and more, it encompasses how we move through the world.”
The partnership lasted about nine months. The name stuck, and the agency grew into it.
What Grit is known for: packaging that turns into campaigns
For the past five or six years, Grit has lived in consumer packaged goods. The agency often meets brands at the design stage — a brand-new product that needs a look, or a tired one that needs a redesign.
Then the relationship tends to keep going. “A lot of times we just keep that going and turn that into, let us work on your full campaign — TV, radio, outdoor, everything else in between,” Topping says.
The box on the shelf is the foot in the door. The rest of the house follows.
Three things Grit brings to the table
First, design chops. Everyone at Grit comes from an art and design background, and the shop is stacked with award-winning packaging designers.
Second, a holistic view. Topping believes great ideas can come from anywhere, so a packaging project is never treated as only a packaging project.
Third, scrappiness. Grit has a knack for carrying an idea “from branding all the way down through in store” — the unglamorous last mile where plenty of good ideas quietly die.
Life without timesheets (or round limits)
Most of the team came up in Omnicom-style shops, justifying every hour of the day. At Grit, clients get one price for a campaign or a packaging system, and the agency does whatever it takes.
That means no “three rounds and you’re done.” Topping says the team will go 35 rounds if everyone is moving in the same direction — and nobody has to explain round 20 to a holding company.
He still remembers an Omnicom-era meeting meant to sell an annual campaign that got derailed by $3,500 in printing charges. Grit’s clients don’t get those invoices. “It’s not just about the money,” he says. “They can tell that we’re literally killing ourselves to make it great.”
Why brands should call Grit
“Because we’re so damn good,” Topping jokes, before getting to the real answer: stake in the game. Grit hires people who would do this work for free because they love it, and that energy carries into client relationships.
The agency has worked with founders hand-applying labels in their kitchens and with brands spending millions on activation teams. The lesson is the same at both ends of the budget — every dollar has to sell something.
“We don’t ever want to do anything just to be fancy or a flash in the pan,” Topping says. Fun is welcome. Fun that doesn’t move product isn’t.
Nine to five, mountains after
When Grit launched, the industry ran on who could work the most — 80-hour weeks, both weekend days, last person out the door. Topping watched it produce great campaigns and burned-out people.
So Grit holds a firm line. Everyone arrives at nine, the team usually eats lunch together for an hour and everyone leaves at five. Last year the agency worked one weekend, maybe.
When the workload swells, Grit leans on about 10 trusted freelancers — copywriters, art directors and production pros, many of them collaborators for over a decade. That keeps the core team on the big ideas and everyone’s evenings intact. This is Colorado, after all. The mountains aren’t going to ski themselves.
Weirdos, misfits and underdogs — all three
Topping cheats and picks a combination. Grit deliberately avoids the design-shop trap where every hire clones the founder’s mid-century modern aesthetic.
Instead, the roster mixes artsy skateboard-and-music types, former college athletes and process keepers who never worked in creative before. The soundtrack sparks its own debates. “Sometimes we get in big giant fights around how long you can play the Grateful Dead or how long you can play ’90s hip hop,” he says.
The underdog part is geography and size. Grit has peaked around 20 people but considers 10 its sweet spot, and Denver isn’t exactly crowded with Fortune 500 headquarters. Award season, Topping admits, can feel like a long shot.
Dear Boom Chicka Pop: the smell sold us
Topping’s shout-out comes with a confession — he might just be hungry. Early in Grit’s work with Conagra, the team filmed behind the scenes at the Boom Chicka Pop factory in Minneapolis and spent hours breathing it in.
He thinks the popcorn brand has plenty of room to grow. “That would be an amazing brand to really send into the stratosphere,” he says.
Consider the brief delivered.
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