2024 is special year for us at Stride Creative Group. It marks 20 years in business.
20 years…. wow! Two decades of partnering with clients, taking risks, sweating the details, and celebrating the results of hard work… of learning, growing, falling, and getting back up… and of countless people who have touched our lives along the way.
I’m feeling grateful for all of it.
It was a crazy and humble start. I’d gone and quit my Art Director job of 8 years — just as my personal life was winding up into chaos mode, with two young kids and a brand-new mortgage — for the dicey dream of starting a business. With equal parts confidence and ignorance, my new business partner and I traded in elegant downtown digs for second-hand furniture in a cluttered basement. For the first five months, Catherine and I spent long days in our windowless makeshift office, overworked and underslept, but excited by the strange risk we’d undertaken.
The risk paid off surprisingly quickly. It wasn’t long before we had a steady stream of business, an office space in Burlington, and our first employee. Soon came a bigger space and more employees, but we held fast to our vision of remaining an intentionally small and quality-driven creative firm. Year after year, success came from discipline, collaboration, a commonsense approach (one that was remarkably less common than we realized), and in treating our clients as true creative partners.
Fast forward to today, and we still hold to those same values. Though a lot has changed — from old technology to AI, from two partners to now me at the helm — Stride is as strong as ever. I’m grateful for these past 20 years, for all that it took to make our firm what it is today, and for the countless businesses and organizations that have put their trust in us. It’s been the privilege of a lifetime, and I’m looking forward to the decade ahead.
– Terri
My workspace in our first Burlington office, complete with a paper rolodex, CDs, PowerMac G4, and hand-me-down desk.
Years later in our larger Burlington office in the same building, where we are today.
Me and Catherine… still smiling.
