Gus Lands Lovesac as Co-Founders Step Into CEO and CCO Roles

Pablo NYC alum Maxie Etess joins as Head of Account Management as the five-year-old indie agency formalizes its senior-led model

Gus has been named lead creative agency across brand and campaigns for The Lovesac Company (Nasdaq: LOVE), the $697 million modular furniture brand that has spent nearly three decades convincing America it never really wanted a regular couch.

And because one announcement is rarely enough, the five-year-old independent agency is formalizing its leadership at the same time.

That’s where it’s at

Lovesac is the kind of client Gus was built for — senior-led teams, small-by-design, direct to the decisions. No slideware middlemen. No account pyramid.

Recent Lovesac work supports the case for moving at cultural speed. The brand has leaned into stunts like its Couchmas blitz — a couch-a-day giveaway between Christmas and New Year’s — and the Valentine’s “SITUATIONSHIP” push with Summer House’s Amanda Batula. That kind of fast cultural work tends to die by committee in agency machinery.

“Lovesac is exactly the kind of partner this model is built for — ambitious, product-driven and ready to lean into disruptive creative,” said Spencer LaVallee, now Chief Creative Officer.

Headin’ down the agency highway

Co-founders Graham Douglas and Spencer LaVallee built Gus in 2020 on the premise that senior teams do the most impactful work, better and faster. Five years in, the client list reads like a cultural cross-section — Mammoth Brands (formerly Harry’s Inc.), Spotify, Away, Netflix, A24, Meta and invideo — and the leadership structure is catching up with the reality of what they’ve built.

Douglas moves into Chief Executive Officer. LaVallee takes Chief Creative Officer. The titles formalize what clients already experienced on the other side of the table.

“As we’ve grown, we’ve kept the business set up around how we want to work, which is a small, senior team staying close to both the ideas and the decisions,” Douglas said. “These roles just formalize that.”

A natural extension

The third piece is Maxie Etess, joining Gus as Head of Account Management. She arrives from Pablo NYC, where she helped launch the New York office as a founding team member, with prior leadership stops at VCCP and Fig — the latter overlapping with LaVallee and Douglas during Douglas’s time at Vimeo.

The reunion is not incidental. Douglas and LaVallee worked together for years before Gus, first shaping work at Droga5 through the 2010s, then again at Fig on brand transformation projects. Etess brings the third seat to the table.

“The team has built something really special, and I’m looking forward to helping grow the agency while partnering closely with clients like Lovesac to define what their companies stand for and translate that clarity into ideas shaping how their brands participate in culture,” Etess said.

Where the argument gets made

Small-by-design isn’t a tagline at Gus. It’s the business model — and Lovesac is where that argument gets made at scale. A $697 million public company. A founder-CEO who has run the brand since 1998. Nearly three decades of category reinvention. And an indie shop holding the creative keys.

If senior proximity is the feature Gus keeps selling, this is the room where it has to land. The whole shack shimmies.