Principal Bios
Kari Kenner, Creative Principal
Kari has loved branding since she a 10-year-old drawing logos for her soccer team. Of course, she didn’t know it was called branding back then. She just liked the process of making images for teams and clubs.
Imbibed with the creative spirit, she earned a BS in Marketing and English from Stetson University. After college, she went on to work in marketing departments for large publicly traded companies as well as small creative agencies. She enjoyed her roles, but at the end of the day, she was working for her bosses – not her clients.
So Kari founded Grasshopper in 2005, and since then she’s focused on what she loves most: helping small and medium sized organizations build awesome marketing strategies and materials so their businesses can grow. She’s an expert marketer who researches constantly to stay cutting edge on her industry’s best practices.
She now has 15 years marketing and advertising experience on both client and agency sides. From concept to execution, she helps clients develop the ideas, images and words to reach their markets. She oversees creative and content development, while defining strategy and tactical execution for all creative marketing programs.
On the side, Kari runs a growing online toy store (Busy Brothers Toys) and uses what she learns to help her clients succeed. She’s a member of several local Atlanta networking groups for small business and entrepreneurs.
Shannon Kenner, Analytics Principal
Shannon’s brain is built with numbers. As a little kid, he thought it was fun to calculate the total bill as his mom shopped for groceries. He tried to figure out everything he could think of that was related to how randomness and averages worked in his kid world.
He studied at Georgia State University, earning a BS in Mathematics and Decision Sciences. He spent the next 15 years helping boutique risk analysis and decisioning firms, along with big-bank analytics departments, figure out stuff like the likelihood a customer would default and the optimum number of customer services reps to minimize call wait time.
In 2011, Kari finally convinced Shannon to leave corporate America and relate his analytical prowess to marketing. So he joined Grasshopper and now applies data-driven marketing techniques to increase website traffic, attract customers, and sell products for Grasshopper clients.
In his spare time, he created the online History Buff Club and is turning it into a community for fans of movies, books, games and discussion of history and military history. Shannon is a member of Mensa and several local Atlanta small business networking groups.