Amid the e-commerce slowdown, Barbarian launches new 200-person commerce division
Ivy Liu
Despite warnings of an e-commerce slowdown after the pandemic-era boom, some marketing agencies are creating new commerce-specific teams.
New York-based creative agency Barbarian has created a new 200-person team it’s named Barbarian Commerce, which will combine new content creation capabilities with other efforts such as first-party data and R&D offerings. As part of the plan, 200 staffers from the content studio Mint Global — a sibling company that creates content for Samsung — will become a part of Barbarian Commerce with offices in Canada, Germany and Poland. (Both Barbarian and Mint are under Samsung’s Cheil Worldwide umbrella.)
The goal is to connect sales and marketing across online, offline and metaverse platforms, according to Barbarian CEO Steven Moy, who will oversee Barbarian Commerce along with CTO Lawrence Edmondson. He said Mint and Barbarian have designed Samsung’s website for the past decade and now want to use those same capabilities for other clients across social media, connected TV, virtual and augmented reality and other types of content. (Samsung’s subsidiaries already support the tech giant with content across 70 countries on a weekly and monthly basis.)