Eric Rojas, founder and chief creative officer of Six+One, has a tidy way of explaining what the New York shop is chasing: “disruption for good.” Not noise for its own sake — a shift in how a category, brand or community sees itself. He and managing director Leigh Baker both came up through the network world before starting Six+One 13 years ago, betting they could do it differently at speed. In that time the agency has launched 30 brands from scratch, work that has gone on to fuel up to $6.7 billion in acquisitions, while keeping clients like Spectrum around for a decade. “We don’t just grow businesses, we grow people,” Rojas says — a line that turns out to be less a slogan than the whole operating system.
13 years, 30 brands and $6.7 billion later
Rojas and Baker left the big-agency world with more than two decades of network experience between them and one shared itch — to build something that moved faster and stayed closer to the work. Six+One was the answer, and 13 years in, the résumé is stacked: 30 brands built from the ground up, several of which sold for a combined figure north of $6 billion.
The trick is range. Six+One is a branding, advertising and activation agency, not one of the three pretending to be all of them.
Known for bending culture, not chasing it
The method has a name: truth, tension, transformation. Six+One finds the truth inside a category or brand, locates the tension living in it, then builds the transformation that makes the brand, in Rojas’s words, “impossible to ignore.”
What separates the shop is its refusal to ride culture’s coattails. “We learned how to shift culture a little bit,” Rojas says — bringing people into an experience rather than talking at them. The approach has earned recognition from Adweek for cultural impact and a Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award.
Three things Six+One does differently
First is end-to-end reach. Six+One will name a brand, build its positioning, then run the advertising and the activations — no handoffs, no gaps. Second is staying power: clients stick around six, seven, eight years, and Spectrum has been aboard for a decade.
Third is cultural fluency — the ability to read a moment and move a brand into it rather than around it. Put together, it’s a small shop doing the work of a much larger one.
That talent and differentiation in the market recently earned the agency Design Agency of the Year, Gold at the 2026 Ad Age Small Agency Awards.
Speedboats beat cruise ships
Six+One is not for sale, and Rojas is blunt about why. “You can’t shift culture outside if you don’t have a healthy culture inside,” he says, and that starts with owning the room rather than answering to a holding company.
His favorite metaphor: indie agencies are speedboats, the networks are cruise ships. Both reach the same destination — one just gets there without 50 people weighing in on the turn. In a here-today-gone-tomorrow market, speed is the point.
Why brands should work with Six+One
Baker’s pitch is refreshingly plain: “You really better like us because you’re going to see a lot of us.” No bait and switch, no account layer standing between the client and the designer doing the work.
Rojas frames the value another way — comfort is expensive. Brands that get too settled leave money on the table, and some die for it. Six+One sells mature disruption, the kind that shifts perception instead of spiking for a second and fading, whether it’s a full rebrand or a Spectrum campaign aimed squarely at movers or gamers.
Grow the brand, grow the person
Ten full-timers, roughly 20 fractional collaborators, and a promise to every hire: you’ll leave better than you arrived. One account exec joined from a small social shop, made supervisor within a year and landed as a senior marketing manager at Uber. The culture is intentional — biweekly coffees with Rojas, monthly Third Thursdays, quarterly dinners the staff picks and a work-from-anywhere month.
Then there’s For the Greater Hood, the agency’s own 501(c)(3), seven years running. The team builds high-end, Nordstrom-style pop-up shops in low-income neighborhoods where 500 guests each get a gift card and a 45-minute one-on-one session to shop three brand-new outfits. More than 17,000 people served, $2.5 million in new clothing given away — and, Rojas notes, the first thing most job candidates mention.
Underdogs who don’t blink
Ask which tribe they belong to — weirdos, misfits or underdogs — and the answer is immediate. “We’re underdogs,” Rojas says. “We love challenger brands. We love challenges. We pack a really hard punch for our size.”
Baker adds the human footnote: he and Rojas come from different sides of the Atlantic and fairly normal, blue-collar backgrounds, which is exactly why clients trust them. No bamboozling, no smartest-people-in-the-room act — just scrappy operators who like earning their place alongside brands sitting at their own inflection point.
A shout to the ones who put them on the list
Baker’s shout-out goes to search consultants Lisa and Kim, formerly of the AAR and now launching a new venture called ASK. Back when nobody knew Six+One, the pair kept slotting the shop onto lists next to far bigger names — early believers who never needed convincing.
Rojas spreads his around: the legacy brands looking to modernize, the disruptors and challengers fighting at their point of inflection, the startups trying to shift a category on their own terms. And then, warmly, his wife Angela. “What’s up, baby?”
Learn more
Six+One
Eric Rojas LinkedIn
Leigh Baker LinkedIn
Six+One LinkedIn
Contact: er**@********ne.com | ca*****@********ne.com
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
