While the initial design direction has been adjusted, we are mere days away from the launch of our redesigned corporate website.  We’re super excited about the new look and can’t wait to share it with you.  Watch this space for our formal launch on August 9th.

When groups of creative people spend countless hours together wild things happen.  As our company continues to grow, our brand is pacing alongside.  The natural progression is a new look for our website.  One goal is to make the site easier to navigate while providing quick access to our most requested features. 

We’d love to share the process with you.  We are done planning and designing, which means we are building the beta site.  If you’d like a sneak peak at the behind-the-scenes, surf on over to our development site: www.s99c.com and take a look.

Watch this space for announcements as we get closer to launch.

My absence from posting can only be attributed to one thing…the birth of my and Amy’s baby girl.

For the last few weeks I’ve been working from home and today, decided to share the view from my home studio desk.

-Christopher

Amy spent some time this week rejuvenating the signage at our Western Massachusetts website design headquarters.  Included in the mix are some fabulous new window decals that are subtle but highly visible.  We’re totally digging this upgrade.

Huh-wha?!? Yes, that’s right…we’ve removed the recycling bins and there’s no more separating trash here at 99. But how can that be?

Ok…hold on…there’s got to be a good explanation, right? Yes, indeed. You see, we’ve stopped recycling simply because we’ve run out of things to recycle. How is that possible?

Over the past year, we’ve worked hard to become a paperless office…with great success. With little or no exception, all business is now done with electronic documentation. From proposals to compositions to invoices, we’ve made the complete switch…everything is paperless.

Without paper to recycle, the only remaining recyclables around the studio were our water bottles. Switch! We’re now using stainless steel refillable bottles, filled with filtered tap. No more plastic.

After these eco-friendly mods stuck we discovered that our recycle bins sat empty…really empty. So we stopped using them. We’ve stopped recycling because we’ve stopped using the things that needed to be recycled. We’d like you to think about doing that too.

Got a green story of your own?  We’d love to hear about it.  Drop us a note.

Where’d the “99″ come from? I get that question almost as much as “Did you really get your start-up money selling patent-leather stiletto-heel shoes?” But that’s a whole different story.

No, the studio’s namesake doesn’t come from the year 1999 or the 80′s pop hit “99 Luftballons”. If we were to name the studio after a year, that year would be 2002, the year we incorporated. And I think “Studio Rock Me Amadeus” just gives the wrong impression. But I digress. Where did we get our name?

The answer is surprisingly simple. Like most start-ups, our early-on shoestring budget left little room for formal office space. Consequently, we worked out of a home office. The home’s street number? Yep, 99. Nice job connecting the dots.

But image is everything, right? So what were we to do when our contemporaries asked where we were working on any particular day? “At home in my jammies” didn’t sound like the vision we were after. We had to come up with something. We did…the tongue-in-cheek “Studio99″. It worked. We liked it. It stuck.

We grew fast and acquired real office space soon enough. That home office is now a bedroom…but it will forever be fondly seen by the studio founders as the four walls that gave us a name.

-Chris

The 99 Leadership Team is meeting this week/end in Cocoa Beach.  We’re strategizing about new service offerings, promotions, and our ever growing client base.

Also on the agenda is our growth and expansion in web design in Cocoa, Port St. John, Titusville, and Orlando.  Jessica, who manages our operations in Florida, is actively exploring some very exciting web design opportunities on the Space Coast.

Stay tuned for updates on these an more exciting things coming from the studio in the near future.

Maybe if we get some time, we’ll hit the beach and post a few pictures here.  Chris keeps threatening that he’s ready to try surfing again.  We’re scared.

Update: Here’s the promised photo. The founders hanging out in Cocoa Village after scoping out some new studio space.

Ok…we’re thrilled about the new look of the website…and aparently so are you.  We’ll post some of the comments in this space over the next few days.  Keep those emails coming in.

Here are some recent comments (we just might be blushing):

“Your new site feels alive, It’s just got a pulse of its own (if that makes sense). ”

“The graphics look great, the text and colors are fun…”

“Clean, hip, funky… definitely not boring!!”

Friends of the Studio and cookbook authors The Brass Sisters were very gracious to us when they included Studio Founder, Christopher Prouty’s name in the Acknowledgements of their latest book Heirloom Cooking with the Brass Sisters.

99 recently re-launched their website and introduced the Brass sisters to the world of Content Management Systems.  Their frequently updated website can be found at www.thebrasssisters.com.

Obsessive runner and Studio Founder, Christopher Prouty competed in …well not some much “competed in” as much as “completed” the ING Miami Marathon on January 25th. Friends and clients nearby both our Western Massachusetts and Port St. John, FL studios provided much needed inspiration to Chris during his training runs.

At the finish line with his wife and Studio Founder, Amy, he recalled a woman at about the twenty mile mark dressed as a parrot taunting him from the sidelines…”or I could have hallucinated that”.

Out of 15,000 runners, 12,500 ran the half marathon and only about 2000 ran the full marathon.