People

Jamie began his career in 1986 as a below average account person at Fallon McElligott in Minneapolis. Hoping he’d do less damage in the creative department, Fallon rehired him as a copywriter. Inspired by the switch, Jamie went on to create hundreds of print ads, most of which are stored in labeled boxes in his attic.

In 1990, Jamie left for Portland, Oregon where he began an eight-year run at Wieden+Kennedy. There he wrote award-winning Nike work for Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, Tiger Woods, and the Atlanta Olympics. In 1996, he was named the lead creative director on the Nike business.

In 1998, Jamie joined Fallon, NY as Partner and Executive Creative Director. Within two years the shop had won four Cannes Gold Lions, and its billings had quintupled to $250 million. In 2000, Jamie was named Adweek’s National Creative Director of the Year.

In January 2002, Jamie checked with his wife and found they had three children under the age of two. Together, they made the decision to leave New York City and relocate to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco. In his first four years there, Jamie developed award-winning work for Saturn, eBay, HBO, the Oakland A’s, and Comcast. In 2002, his Saturn “Sheet Metal” commercial was awarded Commercial of the Year by both Adweek and Advertising Age. In 2004, his eBay work was awarded Campaign of the Year by the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP). In 2005, Comcast was named Adweek’s National Campaign of the Year. In 2006, 2007 and 2008, Jamie was named one of Creativity’s Top 50 creatives. 2009 and 2010 were landmark years for Comcast and the NBA. Comcast’s “Rabbit” was the world’s most awarded commercial, according to Ad Age’s Creativity magazine. And the NBA’s “There Can Be Only One” campaign won a Cannes Lion as well as being parodied by Saturday Night Live and on the cover of Time magazine. Here is a link to some of Jamie’s work from back in the day.

Jamie is fortunate to have created a lot of advertising. But deep down, he yearned to create a place.

So on December 10, 2012, he opened the doors to barrettSF.

Molly is an Account Director and Associate Partner with 10 years of strategic management experience who believes in the magic of branding, dogs and the Minnesota Vikings.

She started her career at Mortar, a small start-up advertising agency in San Francisco. In four years, she swiftly moved from ambitious intern to Senior Account Manager, mastering the art of talking passionate creatives and indecisive clients off the proverbial ledge. Her accounts ranged from education and non-profit accounts such as Golden Gate University and Business for Social Responsibility, to a slew of B2B technology companies, including Isilon Storage, MediaMind and SK Telecom Americas. She also managed to single-handedly carry back 11 drinks from Starbucks, and win the agency’s inaugural March Madness pool.

From there she spent three years at Eleven helping to produce award-winning work for clients like Virgin America, Dignity Health, Yahoo!, Apple, Sun Valley Resort & Visit Sun Valley, Coinstar, and Callaway Golf.

Since joining barrettSF in 2013, Molly has become the heart and soul of the agency while leading a long list of clients including Salesforce, Rubio’s Coastal Grill, 2K Games, Exchange Bank, In-Shape Health Clubs and Tipping Point Community.

Molly still dreams of living with a dog and without a landlord.

Conor is best known as a former professional athlete.

Okay, that’s not exactly true, but it is true that after college he moved to Holland and played a season of professional water polo. It turns out water polo isn’t quite as lucrative as Conor had hoped. So in 2007 he took a “real job” as an Assistant Account Manager at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners. Within a year, he figured out that his passion wasn’t in account managing, but production. So he switched departments and quickly climbed up the production ranks at GS&P.

Conor has produced award-winning campaigns for the NBA, Xfinity, the California Milk Processor Board (“got milk?”), and Chevrolet, amongst others. Career highlights include: shooting with 3-time Academy Award winner Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, traveling the world for Chevrolet’s 100th anniversary campaign, and beating Kevin Durant in one-on-one while on set.*

In 2016, Conor joined the barrettSF family as Head of Production. Since his arrival, the office is significantly louder and redder.

*Editor’s note: it remains unclear if Durant knew they were actually “playing one-on-one.”

Jillian is a surprisingly warm Minnesota native who loves figuring out how creativity can impact business.

She started her career in public relations, pitching pet products to editors who rarely returned her calls. She quickly realized she was passionate about technology’s impact on brands and people, and jumped on an opportunity to build a social and digital PR discipline at Carmichael Lynch Spong in Minneapolis.

A desire to create truly breakthrough strategies and creative work led her to mono in Minneapolis, where she spent 5 years in a growing planning department. In addition to brand positioning and messaging work for Target, Lucy Activewear, MSNBC, and Phillips Distilling Company, she worked on experiential projects that became some of the agency’s most awarded work: The Blu Dot Real Good Chair Experiment, Blue Cross Blue Shield’s ‘Human Doing’, The Lucy Light Forest, and Target’s Tweet-to-Runway Show.

After 30+ winters in the frozen tundra, Jillian realized she could spend the whole year somewhere warm(ish). She made the move to San Francisco’s sunniest neighborhood and started building a brand strategy department at Office. Working closely with the marketing team at Whole Foods Market, she helped extend the brand to several new ventures, including the Whole Foods Rewards Program. She also developed a brand and marketing strategy for Stanford Children’s Health and worked on projects for Google, PepsiCo, and nonprofit 826 Valencia, a creative writing center for underserved kids in the Bay Area.

Since she joined barrettSF, Jillian has been a strong voice for more charts, less screen time, and more happy hours.

When Todd Eisner was in third grade he got in trouble for turning a math test over mid-exam and drawing a picture of Heathcliff on the back. Later, when his teacher handed him back his ‘F,’ she informed Todd that doodling was not a realistic career goal. Incorrect, Ms. Colvin.

Years later Todd enrolled at the University of Delaware, whose mascot is a fighting chicken. Upon graduation he moved to New York City, where he spent the better part of a decade doodling professionally as an art director on brands like Oreo, Planters and Diet Coke. He was also able to pursue a variety of illustration and animation projects and even did some writing for literary powerhouse MAD magazine.

Despite claiming he would never leave New York, Todd ran for the hills of San Francisco in 2011 when an alarmingly tall man named Jamie Barrett offered him a job at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners. While there he helped reposition Chevy trucks, made some debatably disturbing Cheetos commercials, and later ran the trader segment of TDAmeritrade and Sonic Drive-In accounts.

In 2016, Todd was reunited with Jamie when he joined barrettSF as a creative director, proving that time is a flat circle. Whatever that means.

Brad graduated from design school at about the exact moment all things “dot-com” were closing shop. This awkward timing led to a job in something called “advertising” where his title seemed to change daily from “designer” to “interactive designer” to “art director” to “creative” (and every other corporate combination of those words).

In the years since, Brad has worked at large and small award-winning agencies in Boston and San Francisco and has done work for clients ranging from Volkswagen, Audi, Google, Intel, 2K Games, Ubisoft, Bleacher Report, Puma, Timberland, and eBay. His work has appeared in Communication Arts, Graphis, Print Magazine, as well as winning design and ad awards from Cannes, D&AD, The Museum of Modern Art NYC, The Smithsonian/Cooper Hewitt, and AICP.

Additionally, Brad continues to work on passion projects outside the day job including freelance poster work for The Fillmore in San Francisco, photography, and playing in a band that’s entirely too loud.

Aryan Aminzadeh joins barrettSF from Eleven Inc., where she was a copywriter and creative director on brands like Virgin America, Aria Resort & Casino, and Dignity Health. Previously, she worked at various agencies with ampersands, including Saatchi & Saatchi, David & Goliath, and Pereira & O’Dell. Her campaigns have been recognized at The One Show, CLIO, and Cannes Lions advertising festivals.

She once recorded a jingle with Naughty by Nature. Her mom still doesn’t get that she writes commercials, not stars in them.

The head shot you just saw of Aryan is actually a reshoot. The original shot was taken first thing on a Monday, after a very rough weekend. It wasn’t Aryan’s best.

Byron asked his dad to write a bio for him. He may have been drinking at the time. This is what he sent us:

“Driving The Creative Process To New Heights”

“Byron studied Marketing and Spanish at the University of Georgia. Driven by a deep desire to create, he continued his pursuit for excellence in the creative arena¹ at The Creative Circus in Atlanta. While at The Circus, in addition to building his portfolio, Byron led several award winning campaigns as Art Director and as a Creative Intern at Fitzgerald + Co.²

Wanting to explore what the Advertising Industry and the creative process could provide,³ Byron moved from Atlanta to San Francisco to begin his professional career as an Art Director Intern at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. From there, he moved to barrettSF where he is part of an award winning team leading campaigns for clients such as The Bleacher Report,⁴ Stand Up for Cancer,⁵ goSeek, GolfNow and the Redwood Association Grower of Northern California.”⁶

1 – I don’t know what a creative arena is, but I want to go to there
2 – Not entirely true
3 – Big fan of this sentence setup
4 – “Bleacher Report”
5 – “Stand Up TO Cancer” slight difference there
6 – “Humboldt Redwood”

Parents are the best.

Charlotte “Shark” Dugoni originally hails from Portland, Oregon, though she often embarks on seasonal migrations to the warm waters of Mexico where she preys on innocent and helpless baby seals.

But before becoming a flesh-eating predator terrorizing coastal towns all over the world, Shark was a soccer player and student at The University of Montana in Missoula, Montana where she discovered her love of film.

Since entering the murky and occasionally treacherous waters of advertising, Shark has been a part of producing award-winning work at Goodby Silverstein & Partners (Comcast’s “Emily’s Oz”) and has recently found her home as an Associate Producer at barrettSF, working on range of tasty clients including 2K/WWE, Rubio’s Coastal Grill, Humboldt Redwood, and many more.

Lyndsey (with a y) is an account supervisor who happens to be a total brand nerd with a passion for production. She started her life in the working world on the brand marketing team at ARIA Resort & Casino; learning the ins and outs of running a 4,004 room resort and casino, and how to make a brand stand out in a sea of sameness.

After her time in Vegas, Lyndsey moved to the east coast to work on a tech startup and met the man of her dreams. She soon realized she liked the man better than the coast, so together they packed up and headed back west. Settled back in the Bay Area, Lyndsey began working at Eleven, where she had the opportunity to work on the ARIA account as well as GoToMeeting and other GoTo products.

Lyndsey’s hiring at barrettSF was a bit of a serendipitous event, and she is happy to share the longer version of that story over an adult beverage. You can find her currently working on Cost Plus World Market, Sutter Health, and Exchange Bank.

Oh, also. Lyndsey is a lifelong Cubs fan, has a bad habit of overusing commas, and spends as much time as possible snuggling her Bernese Mountain Dog Toast.

Kevin was self-conscious about how long his bio turned out to be on the old website. So, he wrote the CliffsNotes version for the new site. KevsNotes?

He’s a Brand Strategist.

He’s from Richmond, VA and also went to The Brandcenter. He did not live with his parents while going to school, but probably should have. Did you know San Francisco was expensive?

Before he got into advertising, he spent three years in AmeriCorps. He’s proud of the work he did, but he’s not naïve to the fact that it was kind of like three extra years of college.

He met Rafi and Jamie while in school and continued to bug Rafi for almost two years before joining barrettSF.

He now does strategy work for a variety of barrettSF clients, new business pitches, and on a personal level, wants to somehow weasel his way into taking BP on a Major League Baseball field.

He severely sprained his ankle at Jamie’s house his third week of work.

He’s now called Ice. And not because he’s cool.

It took Jocelyn six months and two tries to get this job. What really sealed the deal was when she agreed to shovel snow off the roof of Jamie’s vacation house. (Jamie was mostly kidding about the snow thing. Mostly.)

While she was still interviewing for the job, Jamie compared this position to that of a “Glue Guy” in basketball; the person in this role would be the Draymond Green of bSF. Not yet versed in Bay area sports teams, the name Draymond Green meant nothing to Jocelyn, but what did resonate with her was the opportunity to be a grade A baller and all around valuable asset to the team.

When Rafi called to offer her the job she happily packed up her immense collection of Oregon Duck gear, tie dye, and Oregon Duck tie dye, and headed for San Francisco.

Since her arrival at barrettSF she has taken the glue guy mentality to heart, diving in on whatever projects come her way. While she doesn’t work on any accounts directly, Jocelyn manages Jamie’s schedule and coordinates travel for most of the teams, so she likes to tell herself that she works on every account. At any given time you can catch Jocelyn snapping pictures for the barrett social media profiles, updating this beautiful website, or enabling her co-workers’ moderate La Croix obsession with weekly Costco deliveries.

While she’s mainly been fulfilling her role as Culture Director, Jocelyn’s official bSF contract also lists “Medieval re-enactment expert” so keep your eyes peeled for the first annual barrettSF jousting tournament. If Draymond is looking to expand his glue guy skillset, Jocelyn would gladly show him the ropes.

William didn’t always know his path was winding into advertising. He was obsessive with architecture and music in his younger years, and was convinced one of those two would be his forever-job. After a quick summer internship at an architecture firm in San Francisco, William learned that the field required too much math to ever be fulfilling, so the focus became music. After 4 grueling years of musicianship training, music history memorizing, music analysis debating and plenty of playing at U.C. Berkeley, he wanted to find an industry that celebrates creative, but can apply a more rational strategic and business filter to what they do. Enter Advertising. 

Post-graduation William immediately started working at SF-based agency Venables Bell & Partners, working on all facets of the Audi of America business. Through this exposure in leading fully-integrated campaigns for their lineup of cars, he realized he wanted more hands-on experience with an agency focused and versed in the digital landscape, bringing him to work on the global Skype business at Pereira & O’Dell. This experience, coupled with an intense year on national fast food brand SONIC Drive-In at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, has shaped much of his approach on finding innovative and digital solutions for clients, but understanding integrated and holistic ecosystems to help bring them to life. 

William has a love and passion for all things wine, dogs (especially his two pugs aptly named Zinnie and Pinot) and travel.

Shelby is a strategist with a love of sour candy and a belief that you can never have enough sneakers.

Shelby grew up in Richmond, Virginia, then went to college at Virginia Tech in a good old college town called Blacksburg. During her very last semester there, she took an extra elective class called “Advertising” in which she found her career path in the nick of time. So, following VT, she headed back home to Richmond to spend some more quality time with her family cat, Simba, and to study brand strategy at the VCU Brandcenter.

During her time at the Brandcenter, she learned how to connect her curiosity about the world and the people in it to business and brands. She also drank an obscene amount of 7/11 coffee, and got to work with a lot of brilliant people. She wanted to continue to do that last part, so after graduation, she accepted a job at barrettSF. 

Before joining barrettSF, Shelby had only been to San Francisco once. She’s loving it other than the fact that she has to wear a sweatshirt on the beach.

Robert is a Group Account Director and native Texan who grew up on a prison farm. Seriously, his Dad was a warden. But over the course of his childhood, Robert decided that the prison life wasn’t for him and wanted to explore a more creative path.

After attending graduate school at the University of Texas, Robert began his career in Austin at SicolaMartin, working on B2B brands like AMD and HP. He then went down the street to GSD&M where he spent time working on Kohler and Partnership for a Drug-Free America.  

Tired of the Texas heat, Robert decided to move out to San Francisco and work with Venables, Bell and Partners where he spent 7.5 years working across numerous brands like HBO and Google. He also spent time at ARGONAUT working on AT&T’s Cricket Wireless and at TBD working projects for the Ad Council, StubHub, and Havaianas.

You can find him currently working on Cost Plus World Market, Sutter Health, Rubio’s Coastal Grill, and FoxtNext. When he isn’t doing advertising, you can find him feeding his food and cooking obsession and fawning lovingly over his corgi, Watson.

Just another kid from Detroit who isn’t actually from Detroit. Maddy grew up listening to engines roar and tires burn. She left her destined path in the automotive industry and followed the smell of the Pacific Ocean. After getting out of the car for the first time in San Francisco she said, “This is the best smelling city I’ve ever been in.” It was that moment when she realized that American cars were a thing of the past and San Francisco was the new road of opportunity.

She suffered a grueling four years smelling corn fields in Ohio where she attended undergrad at Denison University. There, Maddy majored in Economics until she realized that classes that involve paint brushes and body parts were much more stimulating. Eager to leave those corn fields behind, Maddy ventured across the great sea in hopes of utilizing her 10 years of Mandarin classes while studying at East China Normal University in Shanghai. After consuming 786 dumplings, Maddy took her talents back to Ohio where she found practicing Chinese in Ohio about as challenging as finding somebody in Ohio who would speak Chinese back to her.

Maddy’s road to barrett started with one eager-beaver of an email. To her delight she has joined the ultra-passionate, ultra-fascinating, and ultra-smelling team! “She did it!” You can find Maddy attempting to spark a stand-up career to any Uber driver that will listen to her. She swears that nothing tastes better than a large glass of whole milk on ice. And so far, her biggest accomplishment has been being the Baritone section leader in her high school marching band.

Christian Zerbel grew up in Snohomish, a town overly proud of its title: “The Antique Capital of Washington State.” But it’s perhaps better known for the “Naked Pig” scandal of 2004, in which the local BBQ Shack painted a mural that featured smiling caricatures of pigs — without clothes. 

Full-on nude hogs. (see below)

The town council went berserk, and demanded the smut removed: “naked pigs might lead to paintings of naked people.” The restaurant refused, triggering a years long standoff. 

The matter was ultimately decided in a series of federal lawsuits. 

BBQ Shack later filed bankruptcy. 


When pressed on why this anecdote would be included in his bio, Christian gave some half-baked answer about “discovering the gravity of messaging.” Mostly he just thinks it’s very, very funny. 

In 2011, as a staff reporter at his community college student paper, Christian investigated the greatest story of his career: “BookGate.” Turns out, the slimey cowards at the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society intentionally mislabeled textbook donation bins. They sold the books for profit, instead of giving them to underprivileged children. He estimated the club STOLE about $5,200 from CHILDREN. 

No one was punished. Christian quit journalism shortly after.  

Christian graduated from the University of Washington and took a job in PR, where he ghost wrote “expert opinion” articles about trains. Mostly train wrecks. 

Hating it, he moved to Atlanta to study copywriting at The Creative Circus.  He graduated, moved to San Francisco, joined barrettSF, and is finally feeling as if he’s on the right track. 


Speaking of tracks, don’t ride trains. They crash way more than you think.

Marianne grew up feeding cows in rural California where her dad would bring home dead animals so he could study them for work (he was a professor, don’t make it weird). One day he brought a live bat on a leash to her kindergarten class. 

Thankfully, all the unusual animal experiences gave Marianne a stomach for horror movies and fueled her fascination for visual storytelling of all kinds. She graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in Film & Digital Media and after spending some time post-college dipping her toes in a variety of proverbial waters (she did marketing for an Internet company, lived in France, and managed an art-deco movie theater), she moved to San Francisco where she worked as an Executive Assistant at Camp + King. It was there that she was introduced to the world of advertising and it wasn’t long before she realized production was the place for her. She joins barrettSF after 3 years at Heat producing work for clients like Facebook, Mountain Dew, and Wild Turkey.

After an eight-year career in the veterinary field where Claudia got to pet all animals (even a Sea Lion), it was time for her to hang up her scrubs for good. So Claudia headed over to Kellogg’s farm in Pomona, California to study graphic design (they also offered Animal Science if the design thing didn’t work out). After three very intense years of studying, Claudia graduated with a BFA and headed back home to San Francisco. 

Where her good friend, Brad Kayal, introduced her to the world of advertising.

Claudia began her advertising career as a freelancer where she got to work at most of the ad agencies in San Francisco, and even commuted over the Golden Gate bridge for three months. Prior to barrettSF Claudia worked as a designer for Heat for two years where she did branding, illustration, print, and digital media.

These days, Claudia sits right across from Brad Kayal at bSF. Which is nice, because she can easily fetch him Coke Zero, Sour Patch Kids, and when necessary, be his personal designer.  

Thanks Brad.

Dan’s the guy wearing the green visor, counting the money and keeping the creatives honest to ensure barrettSF can survive and thrive for years to come.

Rachel Zoe Nash, aka ‘wiz bang’, is an accountant / finance wizard / business consultant who enjoys a challenge and creating colorful spreadsheets.

Nash came to barrettSF in 2013, and has served as its fiscal second in command, acting directly under CFO+DJ Spinnerty. Under her tenure she has called the firm “one of the top advertising agencies I’ve worked at in San Francisco”, and declared it to have “a pretty sweet selection of La Croix carbonated beverages”.

While employed at the firm, Nash has continued to nurture her passion for debits and credits, while keeping an artfully trained eye on the company’s bottom line. When she’s not looking out for the agency’s financial health, you can find Rachel cheering on the Giants, hanging out with her favorite mouse in Southern California, or visiting her boyfriend in “sunny” Seattle.