the history of perige, according to us.

2002

Shortly after the dot-com bubble bursting and the 9/11 attacks, perige was officially founded in January 2002. This was a significant time in the advertising and marketing industry because for the first time in decades we were seeing massive fear and pullback in the way companies approached their marketing needs. As a result many of the top ad agencies crumbled, leaving talented and experienced artists on the streets scraping together whatever work they could.

 

But as with any difficult circumstances, there was also opportunity – the opportunity to offer agency quality work at boutique prices. This allowed us to capture some market share while growing alongside visionary companies as they strived to rebound.

 

2003

perige was starting to finally get some legs of stability after the first year of turbulent business. Matt became a partner which expanded our work capabilities from just print to flash and web development. This also brought creative synergy and camaraderie, which was definitely lacking with the one man show setup. Logistically this meant however that we could no longer work out of Russ's house, so we found a “real” office in the downtown ogden area.

 

2004

Things were going great in our third year of business. We were working on some fun projects and cranking out some good work. We played a lot of table tennis and golf and pounded a lot of Farr's ice cream, which was just down the street. Yep, we were livin' the proverbial “high-on-the-hog” lifestyle when all of a sudden everything came to a screeching halt. The workload had dried up with virtually no warning signs at all and as a result we found ourselves in the middle of our own little perige depression.

 

Times got pretty gloomy there for a few months, but we somehow managed to keep a positive attitude as we rode out the storm. By the end of the year we had moved our offices to salt lake and the projects were flowing once again – hurray!

 

2005

What a blur. We must have logged some serious design hours.

 

2006

We were finally beginning to reap the fruits of our efforts from the previous year. Our clients were happy, we were happy, life was good again – until one morning we looked out the window of our office and noticed some dude with a hardhat and clipboard making hand gestures directly toward our shop. We thought “this can't be good” and we soon learned the city was making plans to run railroad tracks right through our office (literally).

 

We did however have a nice little nest egg of cash saved up and moreover we didn't want to show up to work one day with a bulldozer and wrecking ball crane parked in our front yard, so we decided to purchase a building in the sugar house area.

 

2007

2007 was jam packed with our regular workflow. To top it off we jammed out hundreds of line drawings for a large cabinet maker catalog! Busy, busy year.

 

2008

The mortgage crisis ripple was felt by all. We have always been fortunate enough to have a pretty diverse set of clients but with the economic downturn that started in 2007, it seemed as though no company was immune to the mess. As a result (like most businesses) our workflow began shrinking and shrinking and... Sorry kids, looks like Santa ran out of toys before he got to our house this year.

 

2009

2009 was filled with several ups and downs. We've always believed in the flexibility of the smaller boutique size shop, which allows for expansion in good times and contraction in lean times...this year was no exception.