A Decade and Counting

Today, we’re celebrating 10 years in business.  Wow.  How time flies!

It seems like just yesterday, we were moving into our first office space in Irving (right next to the airport) and getting all the desks assembled.  We had absolutely no idea what we were doing as we put together all the basic business collateral and documents for ourselves, like our laughable “Employee Handbook.”

A (Very) Brief History

Since those (humble) beginnings, JDM Digital has gone through a number of, I’ll call them, “Revisions.” Let’s take a walk down memory lane. Feel free to laugh a little with us…

Shortening our Name

You probably don’t remember, but we were originally named “Justin Downey Marketing.” That, rather uninspired name, was because all the “cool” names we could come up with at the time were taken. In fact, we toyed with the idea of that being our first tagline, “Because the name wasn’t taken.”

Back then, this is in 2007-2008, we were a full-service marketing firm. In reality, that’s the place we came from–not the place we wanted to go.

When the (blank) hit the fan in 2008, we narrowed our service offering and started aggressively hiring. After all, the market was flooded with top-talent as the financial crisis reached scary proportions and the larger agencies looked at their payroll expenses as a huge liability.

While the market was in a downward spiral, we hired some of our most talented people. I’m proud to say some are even still here. As we hired, the company wasn’t about little old “Justin Downey” any more. It was all of ours.

So, we shortened the name to just “JDM.” Unfortunately, a Google search for that name returned all sorts of stuff relating to “Japanese Domestic Market.” Not ideal.

In 2009, we changed the name to “JDM Digital” as we entered into our Digital Agency phase.

It’s a Phase

The whole Digital Agency thing was a big deal back in 2009-2010. Everybody started reselling hosting along with their website design work and calling themselves “digital agencies.” We thought we were so cleaver to micro-brand ourselves instead into six or eight smaller brands.

That was a mistake. We ended up succeeding in only confusing our audience. We were just too small to split ourselves into smaller chunks.  Lesson learned.

Coming of Age

In 2012, we came of age. Our Brand had been around long enough that we started getting a positive reputation. Not long after, we launched a new, very modern and “metro” design. That site and “we are who we are” attitude served us well for years. But, like most things in this digital space, it got tired and dated. After all, it looked a lot like Windows 8, before anyone really knew what Windows 8 looked like.

Return of the Simple

What we learned (the hard way), is “simple” is hard. So when it came time for our next revision (slated to coincide with our 10-year anniversary), we started working on a site that took us back to our roots–simple, two-color design, no trendy layouts.

The New JDM Digital

I’m excited to show you what we’ve been working on, but it’s not quite done yet. After all, client work comes first.

At least that’s not a lesson we had to learn the hard way.

UPDATE: The new JDM10 website just launched!