The Early Years

ChimeraCo is the fruition of an idea that started more than thirty years ago... Entering the job market with a collegiate education that blended English and Liberal Arts studies with Computer Science, our founder could not have guessed at the time how prescient was his muddling of these disciplines.

Spending most of the next decade in the employment of one of the largest direct marketing agencies in the world — just prior to the advent of the World Wide Web — he learned the business and the industry from the inside and the ground up; starting as a mail room clerk, then a traffic coordinator, before getting a seat on one of the junior account teams (which is a story in itself). With the dawn of the public Internet, his unique cross-set of skills made for a meteoric rise as clients clamored for their own online presence.

From the first to the last, being in the belly of the behemoth held certain advantages. For the most part, resources were plentiful, and it was a tremendous environment in which to learn and gain real world experience working with scores of clients across disparate industries.

With the birth of a new medium, colleagues at every level with the technical know-how were freelancing and moonlighting their skills, which were in rapidly rising demand. A growing market of independent businesses and SMBEs was emerging with a big appetite, and the seismic shift in exposure the Internet provided changed the landscape of opportunity.

Traditionally, only big money companies could afford the high-priced expertise housed in big agencies. But as smaller companies and independents aggressively hunted for ways to tap in to that knowledge and skill base, the talent pool was all too happy to oblige (even if it meant breaking the rules).

The new marketplace had spoken its demand, and it was time to supply it by "affordably providing small businesses, entrepreneurs and organizations professional agency services." Initially, Chimera Company services were almost exclusively focused on print media and direct marketing, but quickly expanded into digital media and custom web design.

The InterWebs

ChimeraCo first added Internet advertising and web media services in 1996, when the World Wide Web was still the Wild Wild West and most still perceived it as a branding opportunity instead of a new directional medium. Many companies were still in the process of reserving or wrestling domain names away from early squatters, let alone producing interactive or transactionable sites. 'Yahoo!' was the king of online search and Google didn't exist.

The dot-com boom and Internet advertising rollercoaster reached its infamous peak as the millenium ticked over, and then began its equally infamous crash and recovery, which marked the maturation of the Internet medium and heralded its evolution into the commercial and social marketplace as it exists today. Through it all, ChimeraCo has also evolved to deliver increasingly robust site designs with engaging content and digital media that connects with your target audience.

The Chimera

The legendary Chimera is meant to be an unimaginable beast or monster, made up of the parts of other creatures. As such, it is intended to compound fear with confusion, and embody a thing impossible to tame or master, let alone defeat in a head-on confrontation.

The Chimera was chosen by our founder as emblematic of the problems independent owners everywhere face as they valiantly run their business using their inherent skills, education and training, industry specific knowledge and subject-matter expertise — while being simultaneously distracted and sometimes confused and even confounded by the persistent and bedeviling necessities of marketing, advertising and promotion, and the emergences of new technologies. We're here to help you take on your particular Chimera — and perhaps even make friends with it.