An early November cold front has swept through downtown, snuffing out a brief stint of Indian summer and muting the city in a cold gray funk, stripping the streets bare of the usual swarming rush of Friday afternoon activity.
But the new Fourth Street offices of Blue Whitespace (BWS), a design-minded strategy and marketing firm, are buzzing with activity. Workers meander through the company’s seventh floor offices, painting conference room walls, hanging artwork and dodging boxes of soon-to-be-unpacked office supplies while Lisa Boh, co-founder and creative director of BWS, offers a guided tour of her company’s new home.
The new space is a significant departure from the company’s cramped Mount Lookout offices. The space is a mash-up of narrow hallways, lofty workspaces for the company’s team of four designers and brainstorming nooks complete with overstuffed couches, that lets the company stretch its legs.
But more importantly, it allows BWS to cozy up to the offices of its new parent company, Promotion Execution Partners (PEP) an award-winning promotion services company with five offices nationwide.
Founded in 2002, BWS is the brainchild of Boh, 31, and her high school friend, Heather Bleill Fricke, 31, art director of BWS. The pair had tossed around the idea of starting their own graphic design company since college while Boh was studying graphic design at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design Art and Planning and Fricke fine arts at the University of Dayton.
“We wanted the opportunity to have a flexible work environment and do the work that we love, and do it together,” Boh says.
Armed with a handful of college-level business and marketing classes and a running list of contacts and clients accrued from Boh’s freelancing business and Fricke’s stint as a graphic designer for Intrinzic Marketing and Design, the pair launched Blue Whitespace.
“We very quickly decided we wanted to work with medium-sized clients where we can actually get to know the clients,” Boh says, “When you’re working on one tiny piece of a larger project you don’t see the impact of your work. We made deliberate decisions about the type of clients and went aggressively after them.”
Clients included work for a string of local non-profit agencies and grew to include national clients including major financial institutions and the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber, Fernald Preserve and Trinity Biotech during the first few years of business. “We nailed one big client and that was the springboard for the next six years,” Fricke says.
In fact, the duo was able to attract, and keep, clients by reading in between the lines when it came to client needs. “We have developed a unique ability to understand what the client is really asking for, not just their initial request,” Boh says, “and get to the bottom of what they really need.”
For the team, this means a combination of extensive client research, multiple interviews and shadowing clients to better understand how their businesses operate as a whole. Through this process, the team is able to develop a tailor-made business marketing solution to determine which deliverables (Web sites, brochures, business cards, etc.) the client needs. “A lot of times, someone would come in and say, ‘I need a brochure,’ when in actuality they needed true marketing advice or a better understanding of their marketing strategy,” Boh says.
While the flexibility of a small firm combined with BWS’s intuitive knowledge of client needs developed client loyalty, it was Boh and Fricke’s passion for their field that kept the fledgling company thriving and growing.
“It’s all about seeing something you created helping a company and developing them as a brand,” Fricke says, “All of a sudden the project is out there, and there’s a sense of pride in that you’re making a difference.”
And there was a lot of opportunity to make a difference. With two Addy awards under their belt, a growing client list and an expanding team of designers, the company was beginning to feel the pinch of expansion. “There were a lot of growing pains. We were able to grow from a team of two to nine, but the team shrinks and swells.”
In 2005, a solution appeared when BWS began working with Dave Kroeger, president of Promotion Execution Partners, on a project for a major financial institution. Impressed with the winning combination of customer service and creative agility that was brought by having both partners, Boh and Fricke, working on the project; Kroeger approached the team with an acquisition offer.
Selling to Promotion Execution Partners would allow BWS to stabilize the ebb and flow of developing and servicing a growing business, a challenge BWS was struggling through. “It [the proposition] was everything we needed from a business perspective and everything we needed for personal growth,” Boh says. “With the backing of our parent company we really are able to grow at a stable rate. We are able to support any big ideas we have. Everything I’ve wanted as an entrepreneur I now can do because with that backing we can do things that as two individuals we couldn’t do.”
The partners accepted the offer and on May 1, 2008, BWS was sold to PEP.
For BWS, this meant opportunities to work with clients like major pharmaceutical companies that they didn’t have access to as a ten person boutique firm.
For PEP, this meant augmenting their list of promotional services to create a sort of one-stop shop for client’s marketing needs. With BWS serving as PEP’s creative branch, a diverse line-up of services like corporate branding, marketing communication, print advertising and web development is offered in conjunction with PEP’s extended services, which includes direct-to-consumer, in-store and other marketing promotions.
“The synergy of growing with PEP has gotten us over the hump,” Boh says, “The story is here. The story is what we’re doing now and how we can grow because of working with Promotion Execution Partners.”
Photography by Scott Beseler
The design team at Blue Whitespace
Lisa Boh and Heather Bleill Fricke
Blue Whitespace logo
Lisa Boh and Heather Bleill Fricke
Promotion execution partners logo
Megan Parin escaped the corn fields of rural Ohio in 2005 to study Journalism and Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati where she was recently recognized as a Department of Journalism Outstanding Graduating Senior. She has used internships at Cincinnati Magazine, Cincinnati Wedding Magazine and now Soapbox magazine as a chance to explore the ins and outs and ups and downs of the City of Seven Hills. Most days you can find her trolling Ludlow Avenue and environs for a healthy dose of Clifton crazy.
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