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Konrad Spilva and Isobar colleagues launch Shadowboxer – a creative consultancy with venture arm

Former Visual Jazz founder and Isobar CEO Konrad Spilva has officially launched Shadowboxer, the creative consultancy he hinted at earlier this month when he was announced as a consultant to Hardie Grant.

Spilva takes on the role of managing partner and founder, and will be joined by Mike Fraser and Stephen Graham, who take on roles as creative and strategy partners, respectively. It has also been confirmed that more foundational partners will be announced in the coming months.

(L-R): Fraser, Graham and Spilva make up Shadowboxer

According to Spilva, Shadowboxer has been designed to bring together the best of agency and consultancy worlds for clients, combining brand, experience and technology transformation with business strategy in a small and senior team.

“Brand experience is really the modern agency position but what’s missing from that is the capability to reimagine the business model, ways of working and culture to support it all. It seems crazy to me that clients trust agencies with brand but revert to consultancies for business strategy. We need to build business and brands together from the same strategy,” Spilva told Mumbrella.

Spilva was recently announced as a consultant to Hardie Grant

“When it comes to agency versus consultancy we don’t care what we end up being called, but what is important for us is that we set up a business that would only implement a solution when we either had skin in the game, or could be solution agnostic. For clients, this simply means our work is never biased towards a bench of free talent that specialises in a particular technology.”

Shadowboxer will have “skin in the game” through the venture arm of the business.

“We wanted to create a business that could actually put skin in the game with clients and cut all of the management layers that often slow work down and focus on selling value, not time-sheets,” Graham said.

“That simply wouldn’t fly in a holding group where profits head to plush boardrooms on the other side of the world.

“We genuinely want to invest in Australian businesses and show clients we’re committed to real partnerships, not just here to respond to simple asset briefs.”

Shadowboxer will consult to clients across three core areas: business and brand strategy, creative and design and technology and data.

Foundation clients include Forty Winks, Defeat Diabetes and Doshii, the latter of which is also a venture client.

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