New York’s fash­ion-savvy bou­tique agency Johannes Leonar­do has just land­ed a mas­sive deal as TTI Floor care’s Agency of Record.

One big account after another

Cre­ative art direc­tors and hard-head­ed account man­agers alike tend to be keen­ly inter­est­ed in rel­a­tive­ly small shops which begin to achieve mete­oric suc­cess, and JL cer­tain­ly falls into this cat­e­go­ry. Mul­ti-award win­ning, the agency only last month won the cov­et­ed Estee Laud­er account. And now it’s king adver­tis­ing pin for the biggest floor care com­pa­ny in North Amer­i­ca (as our busi­ness savvy account man­ag­er might sur­mise, if you’re going to adver­tise for the vac­u­um­ing busi­ness, you might as well adver­tise for all of it).

The deal means JL will now han­dle giant brands like Hoover, Oreck and Dirt Dev­il as well as the UK’s best-sell­ing floor care brand, Vax. And the evi­dence is that TTI Floor Care is aggres­sive­ly upping its adver­tis­ing spend, which Adweek reports soared from $27 mil­lion in 2012 (for Hoover, Oreck and Dirt Dev­il) to a stag­ger­ing $67 mil­lion in 2013.

Blown away

Announc­ing the deal, TTI Floor Care’s CMO, Alan Grave­ly, told Adweek and AdAge:

“We were impressed with all the agen­cies we spoke with, but we were blown away by Johannes Leonar­do. A dozen agen­cies pitched the busi­ness. Johannes Leonar­do has exten­sive exper­tise with icon­ic brands and a phi­los­o­phy that it’s con­sumers, not the media, who con­trol the con­ver­sa­tion today. The idea of the con­sumer as the medi­um fits well with our vision for TTI Floor Care as an orga­ni­za­tion cen­tered around the consumer.”

The agency’s CEO, Michael Duda says that he’d been attract­ed by TTI’s “vision­ary aspi­ra­tions and a pas­sion­ate com­mit­ment to change the cat­e­go­ry.” JL, which takes the baton from TTI’s pre­vi­ous AOR, The Black Arts (a small UK-based cre­ative agency), will now get to work on unique cam­paigns for each of the four brands.

Mul­ti­lin­gual tal­ent 

And for account man­agers dream­ing of land­ing a sim­i­lar account for their agen­cies, here’s anoth­er thing. TTI’s VP of Glob­al Mar­ket­ing, Liz Cope, was deeply impressed with the agency’s mul­ti­lin­gual capa­bil­i­ties: between them, JL’s team speaks 11 dif­fer­ent lan­guages. The agency has attract­ed tal­ent to its NY home from across the world and Ms. Cope thought that was just the tick­et for TTI’s inter­na­tion­al brand portfolio.

Way to go, Johannes Leonar­do, way to go.