Today, Together Group — owner of PR firm Purple, among others — announces its 14th acquisition: Obo, a French experiential creative studio founded in 2000 by René Célestin, who is best known for his work as creative director and head producer of Victoria’s Secret’s fashion shows, which he led for 12 consecutive years. More recently, Obo orchestrated the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics and the L’Oréal Paris fashion shows, and also counts brands such as Saint Laurent, Celine and The Row as clients.
It is the latest move by Together Group to become a one-stop shop that services luxury brands across marketing and communications, brand strategy, production and digital.
Together Group was founded in 2017 by Brad Fry and Paul Sheehy, and is led by Christian Kurtzke, a seasoned CEO who joined them before the initial funding was secured. Kurtzke has led luxury brands such as car manufacturer Porsche s luxury division, Porsche Design, and heritage porcelain brand Meissen, and was also founding president of German luxury trade body Meisterkreis. It is backed by institutional investors such as PGIM and Cheyne Capital as well as family offices, with the group and the agency founders holding the majority of shares (the group declined to share how much capital it has raised to date). Its closest rival is The Independents, a collective of brand experience, strategy, design and production agencies that includes PR firms Karla Otto and Lucien Pagès Communication, influencer marketing platform Lefty, Paris-based production company Terminal 9 Studios and more. One of the key differences, Kurtzke says, is that Together Group services brands across the luxury sector, rather than focusing solely on fashion and beauty.
After a period spent fundraising and identifying the right targets, Together Group made its first acquisition — Purple PR — in 2021, swiftly followed by ultra-high-net-worth-focused branding agency Construct, China-focused digital marketing agency Hot Pot, and high-end real estate branding and content agency Noë Associates.
In 2022, the company acquired branding and commerce agency King Partners, social and influencer marketing agency Folk, corporate communications and crisis management firm Seven Dials City and strategic foresight agency The Future Laboratory. In 2023, Together Group added content production agency North Six; and in 2024, it added Middle Eastern communications agency Frame. Its past three acquisitions have been focused on digital solutions: digital design and tech agency Metajive, architectural CGI agency Visualisation One and real estate digital twin agency Imerza.
Here, Kurtzke shares his vision for the group.
Vogue: What drew you to acquiring Obo?
We were looking for an agency that is well positioned in the experiential space, not only for fashion but also across a broad range of luxury segments as well as technology and media — someone who’s producing experiential events for Cartier and Bvlgari, but also Disney and Netflix. The digital twin technology they leverage is also very exciting for us because it allows them to create a much richer experience.
Obo creates digital replicas of the event environment that are dynamic and time driven — venue, scenography, audience flow, lighting and camera positions — before anything is built physically. This enables their creative teams to visualise the full experience, collaborate remotely with designers and partners, and anticipate challenges early. It also gives their clients and stakeholders a clear, immersive preview of the concept before sign-off. It’s exactly what we were looking for with our platform strategy; it complements our existing capabilities on the experiential side.
Vogue: What is the bigger picture for Together Group?
Our vision was always to build a powerhouse that helps luxury brands transform themselves for the future. If you want to be effective at transforming, you need to be strong on the strategy side, the digital side, and the marketing and communications, bringing all these ingredients together. All of the 14 acquisitions are equally important — they all play their role in this bigger transformational platform. From day one, we had the ambition to build a global group so that we have the cultural intelligence and connectedness to support global clients — so we have agencies and clients in the US, EMEA [Europe, the Middle East and Africa] and Asia.
The goal is to help brands transform from product to an experience economy. We see a need to transform the whole service chain, and for that, you need an operating system including data that will allow you to hyper-personalise and tech to bring the immersive experiences to life. I do not believe that traditional marketing will allow luxury brands to sustain going forward. It’s not only about storytelling, but about creating worlds where you celebrate human craft and creativity.
Vogue: Are there any gaps in the portfolio you’re looking to fill?
There will be some activities on the talent side in the near future, but I won’t say any more.
Vogue: What are the challenges luxury brands are facing that you’re hoping to solve?
Luxury faces quite a few challenges at the moment. Some of those issues are self-inflicted — like pricing policies — but there’s also the macro issues. There’s a huge [macroeconomic] uncertainty we’re facing, and we’re still in a cost of living crisis, which affects aspirational customers. A decade ago, we started talking about a change from products to experiences, and there are the trends towards digital. But what does that really mean for luxury?
I believe we’ve industrialised luxury a bit too much in order to drive scale, and it’s time to go back to the core. At the heart of luxury, you need to celebrate creativity, human craft and culture. These are the fundamentals. But the way we do that in the future will be very different. We need to think across categories, into jewellery, hospitality, property, branded residencies, food and beverage — because as a brand, we need to culturally resonate with our audience. If you define yourself only by the industry segment that you’re working in, you’re missing the point. We need to disrupt these siloed ways of thinking, leveraging across disciplines from creative direction to retail to marketing to technology.
Vogue: What differentiates you from The Independents?
The Independents is a great group. They are very much focused on fashion and on fashion shows, whereas we are broader. While the human-led elements are crucial — particularly in luxury — you cannot do the transformation without transformational technologies [like artificial intelligence]. If fundamentally, luxury is about storytelling, the immersive technologies, digital twin-led, powered technologies, are at the heart of next-generation storytelling. We want to create a world in which you can immerse yourself and really experience the brand and its products and its services — it’s storytelling, but also brand entertainment. That’s what we’re doing.
Examples today would be the branding and immersive experience we designed to market the exclusive penthouse of The Surrey in New York, bringing luxury property to life, or the rich, immersive storytelling experiences that Obo creates for their fashion shows. In the future, we envision such digital immersive worlds at the heart of experiential retail, reaching far beyond the transactional-focused worlds of many existing e-commerce and physical retailers today.
Vogue: What’s your strategy for scaling, and are there any challenges?
The main challenge has been to preserve our ambitions without compromising the balance between a big holding group and boutique agencies. We’re constantly raising funds, and what impresses the investors is that we’re not driven by economies of scale, we’re driven by quality. We could have scaled up faster, but we weren’t in a rush and we wanted to preserve the entrepreneurial culture of the boutique groups. It’s all too easy to become industrialised, but the way we want to retain and manage brands is much closer to an LVMH, where we bring founder-led or family-owned brands, agencies or studios into our portfolio and then nurture their growth. It’s very different from the industrial paradigm where we acquire your brand, then in a year it’s absorbed into a master brand.
I would actually say that we avoid the challenges of traditional mergers, where founders want to exit and brands get consolidated to drive cost synergies, which come with high risks of losing agency identities, key talent and reputation. In contrast, our key challenges are to help our brands cope with accelerated growth, learning how to leverage their agency peers to deliver even higher value and building their legacies of excellence by developing and empowering the next generation of leaders.
Correction: Updated to add Brad Fry and Paul Sheehy as founders, and clarify that Kurtzke was CEO of Porsche Design, not Porsche. (27/5/25)
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