US tech firm Epam has designs on Great Fridays

MANCHESTER design consultancy Great Fridays, has been sold to a listed US group.

Great Fridays, headquartered at Tower 12, Bridge Street and with offices in London, New York and San Francisco, has been acquired for an undisclosed sum by US technology group Epam – recently ranked by Forbes Magazine as America’s third best small company.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Great Fridays, which was owned by its founders Matt Farrar and Rob Noble, was advised by technology focused investment bank GP Bullhound.

The £3m turnover business counts bluechip corporates such as Pearson, Vodafone and MasterCard among its clients.

Farrar and Noble said: “We have championed design as the bridge between business, brand, technology and the consumer for the last six years. Becoming part of the EPAM family places design thinking at the forefront of EPAM’s client proposition.

“We can’t wait to combine our product and service design approach with EPAM’s software engineering excellence and global scale.”

In a statement on their website, the pair added:”Great Fridays’ biggest challenge has been our size and whether we can scale as quickly as the opportunities that presented themselves to us. We have achieved a great deal in a short space of time, but our David-sized Design slingshot was never big enough to transform the Goliaths of global brands.

“Consequently, in the autumn 2013 we made a strategic decision to find a partner who understood our vision, aspirations and wanted to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us in our ambition to change the world through design.”

Arkadiy Dobkin, EPAM’s CEO and President said: “We are very excited to have Great Fridays join the EPAM team. Our clients eagerly welcomed the combination of digital skills and strong engineering which we created with our acquisition of Empathy Lab two years ago. Great Fridays’ ‘design authority’ approach further expands our capabilities and helps our clients develop their business strategies.”

GP Bullhound Partner Alec Dafferner added: “The combination of Great Fridays and EPAM, who are both recognized leaders in their respective fields, will create a powerful force in the design sector.”