Everyone here at JC&A loves working alongside Garrett – what’s not to love about a guy who dons a chicken suit when asked, organizes the annual Super Bowl Squares for JCAres and is an all-around fantastic Senior PM?! As hard as it is to imagine the halls without GZ, it’s equally difficult to believe that this is his 17th year with JC&A… a tenure that all began with a twist of fate.
As you may (or may not) know, Garrett started out as an architect, living and working in Minneapolis, Boston and Prague while dreaming of a future on the Left Bank of Paris. While pondering a move to the West Coast, he went for drinks after a Friday skate night, and left with an opportunity to interview for a new career here at JC&A. Once he had that brand-new Blackberry in hand, the idea of life exploring Paris or Oregon just couldn’t compete!
Aside from missing his flip-phone, Garrett fell right into place here and is an integral part of the JC&A family. Moving up over the years from a freshly-minted APM to a respected Sr. PM, he has truly seen it all! With so many projects under his belt, he considers Color Kinetics, TJX NYBuyers Office, working alongside Jacquie at Broadview Networks and all of his projects with Kramer & Dom among his favorites.
Of course, there is a lot more to JC&A than the cool projects and great clients, and Garrett is an OG when it comes to giving back to the community. Garrett shares that he has many proud moments here at JC&A – who can blame him! – and one highlight includes seeing the smile (and tears) from one of the food bank members at Interfaith Social Services when we delivered so much food to them, I’m sure it took the rest of the day to stock the shelves. The donations filled Molly’s X3 to the brim and, Garrett had to ride there sitting on 2 or 3 cases of canned goods in the front seat! This was all born from a little food drive going on in the old office… a hamper was sitting out in the JCafe for a couple weeks with not much in there. One night, Garrett decided to challenge the office to fill the hamper and in three days, the team raised nearly 1100 items to donate to the food bank. Caveat, there was a bet – the east wing (about 12 JCAers at the time) vs the rest of the office (which included the likes of one Mr. Tim Kelly – clearly, GZ underestimated his drive to fill that bad larry up!). As a result of his efforts and the lost bet, Garrett put on the infamous chicken suit for a day and went pick up lunch for the office at the local KFC – fully feathered!
It sounds like many of Garrett’s prized moments at JC&A include costumes – his favorite tradition is the annual Halloween Spooktacular, which he says has gotten even more special now that he has a little one of his own to share the experience with.
When we asked Garrett what the “JC&A Way” means to him, we expected him to say “community”, and we weren’t far off! He said, “To be honest, this evolves for me as each day’s challenges arise, but one constant for me is that we do our best to do our best each and everyday. Some days the challenge is daunting and sometimes it can feel unbeatable, but as I always say – there is always a solution. As a team, we can get past any challenge if we keep the mantra of working together to find that solution.” As a team and a community, and with teammates like Garrett, there really is no challenge JC&A can’t surpass.
