Fifteen4 is 20 years old! And while we don’t want to make you too sick of hearing this, we are going to celebrate for more than a minute.
Many clients over the years have asked us where the name came from and what it means. In 2004, our family lived in a row-house in Sandtown-Winchester as part of a community development not-for-profit in West Baltimore. Our address was 1504. Kurt Dutra, my future business partner, had joined the staff as a young college grad. It was in that basement, our first “office,” that Kurt suggested we name our new for-profit video production business in homage to that place.
Besides dropping the 0, there wasn’t much more meaning other than that the place was transformational in our lives. That, along with the fact that we wanted to follow other agencies we knew of that liked to combine letters and numerals just to be cool.
It was 2004, and we provided creative services, primarily to non-profits who needed storytelling. With a focus on video, our deliverables were DVDs or video files that got loaded on computers and shown at live fundraising events. Then, in 2005, a company called YouTube launched, changing everything for just about everyone else in the world.
Many great companies have started in basements or garages. I’m looking at you Apple, Amazon, and Google. The obvious breakdown in the comparison is that we didn’t parlay our idea into a multi-billion dollar corporation. We’re no Google. But– thriving in this industry for over 20 years as a small agency is no little feat either.
When we founded the agency, “Fifteen4” didn’t mean much. But now, it’s a trusted brand and an idea. Fifteen4 means long-held company values and a carefully guarded culture for both creatives and clients. It means that we listen hard and then try even harder to deliver creative content that lands the plane and delights the passengers along the way. Fifteen4 means you call us when you have a problem that only the right, true story will solve. It means you can count on us to understand your complex solution well enough to get others to see just how amazing it really is. It means that if we make mistakes, we learn from them, and if the work isn’t right, we fix it. We’ve designed and launched brands, built hundreds of websites, made thousands of videos, and won dozens of awards. We have alumni serving all over the creative world, daughter companies (even if we didn’t think of them that way at the time) who do stunning work, often with us still, and a tight team who manage a large ecosystem of partners, contractors and freelancers.