Gary Ricke · Digital Marketing Specialist
I believe in simplicity above all else.
Most of the images on this site were taken with an iPhone 6 and then artistically rendered with an app called Prisma.
My goal is to create a rich visual representation of marketing concepts while simultaneously presenting an authentic, relatable local connection with those visuals.
And with inexpensive gear and post processing software.
I’ve had a lot of nick names, but “G” is my favorite.
There’s been “Ricke G”, “Gar-bear” and “Bart” (long story).
But · G · is simple, and it’s what a colleague and good climbing friend called me back in the mid 90s at The Plastic Network.
I’d left the family business to join a high school friend in starting a web company for the plastics industry and Tom, employee number 3, I believe gave that to me first.
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This is my story:
May, 1995
Yahoo had just incorporated the previous March and was the hottest web property right before Netscape’s IPO was to come later in August.
Sandwiched in between those events I left my father’s injection molding factory to join my friend Tim, who worked at his father’s plastics heating elements company to start a web portal for the plastics industry.
It was the explosion of the world wide web and I got to surf it right when that wave was just getting rolling.
Folks from Netscape visited our offices one day to scout our upstart web company for the Plastics Industry. They shared with us their incorporation of Javascript into the next browser version. We felt pretty special meeting them as they had set a record with their IPO in August 95, gaining a market value of $2.9 billion after only sixteen months in business.
Software engineer Patrick Frisbie and I were the first two employees and from a small office in an industrial park in Elmhurst IL, we created the initial pages of a portal designed to serve the second largest manufacturing industry in the country targeting 20,000 buyers and 2,000 suppliers.
But those early days of the web were truly the wild west and on a 60 mile bike ride together, Pat and I reminisced about those early days.
Listen to this 60 second clip of those times:
But then my daughter was born and for some weird reason I thought maybe that’d be a good time to start my own business.
August 8, 1998
“So close to death yet so alive.”
Three months and 13 days from the birth of my first child I left my job and started Orbis.
In the early days of The Plastics Network, I met Bob who ran Marketing for my friends family company. In our first sit-down together, Bob and I felt like we’d been friends for ages.
Bob had gone off and started his own advertising agency and when he learned I was starting my own company he set me straight with that single statement.
Those words have served me several times over. The first was within two weeks of parking Orbis headquarters in a side office of my dads plastics company.
It was lunch time in August. Doors to the non-airconditioned factory and offices were open to catch as much breeze as possible and everyone, myself included, off in the other side of the building. A big circle of people, cake and my dad blowing out birthday candles. Walking back to my office I saw someone leaving my office with something in his hands.
I caught the license plate as he jumped in and sped off. Walked back into my office to find my computer gone.
That’s a level of deep sickness I’ll never forget.
My dad knew a retired lieutenant in the Chicago Police department. He made a call and they were waiting for the thieves in their driveway when they got home. I got my stuff back. I WAS STILL IN BUSINESS BABY!
In the first 10 years of Orbis, we pioneered our own content management system, built a Chromosome search engine for Abbott Labs and literally watched the explosion of the web right before our eyes. What did we learn in those 10 years? As the financial crisis hit we learned that digital needed to grow up. Smaller budgets demanded more accountable value and that wasn’t a bad thing. The web and digital marketing was just 17 years old in August of 2008 (Web birthday: 8/6/1991, Orbis: 8/8/1998) and we all had some growing up to do.
2010
Industrial strength content management
In 2010 we shifted from building websites on our hand-crafted C#.NET content management system to the same platform Whitehouse.gov was built on — Drupal.
Drupal is open source and industrial strength. Always evolving by the hands of thousands of developers creating and improving tens of thousands of plug-ins. Strong enough to support the White House, it was a no brainer.
With a mega super store of pluggable apps hitting every spectrum of digital marketing, transactional and a security harden code base, it became possible to listen to what people needed without having to think about how to build it.
2012
Making industrial strength more accessible to small businesses
Drupal is open source, free and the most powerful CMS we’ve worked with. But it’s also complex. That’s why we created “seed”. An easy to setup and edit Drupal build that worked great on all devices and was far cheaper and quicker to get businesses up and running. All the power at less cost.
2015
An Easier, Beautiful CMS for Small Business
An architect contacted me, frantic his site was to be shut down in a month. Our Drupal solution was too complex for a one-man shop and was not 4 weeks quick when new content had to be produced in addition to the build. We checked out Squarespace and was able to create a demo architect site in 1 hour. This could work.
Because we didn’t need to code anything we could focus on the content but with just 4 weeks we also needed to eliminate other bottlenecks so we pitched something different. Let’s drive to 6 of his properties, interview him and photograph those properties and then we’d deliver the site complete - no iterative review process.
The architect was blown away by the concept site and I by it’s ease. We created his site in 4 weeks and when one of his clients saw it, she said it felt like paging through an architectural magazine when visiting his new site.
Listen to 2 minutes of a talk I gave to the Chicago American Marketing Association on the experience.
2016
Building a website in real-time
We had converted our client, The Chicago Academy for the Arts from Drupal to Squarespace and completely by accident, stumbled across a new way to create digital.
CAA’s photographer Thomas Mohr was shooting the staff and invited me to tag along while he shot the teachers in their classrooms. Casually, I suggested he give me some photos he took, pulled out my laptop and started placing them into the site. Upon seeing his pictures in context, with copy over the shots, the framing within the navigation — he changed how he shot. We took the laptop to the staff within 20 minutes and they were taken aback, seeing themselves come alive within the site. It felt like magic to all of us.
Listen to a 90 second clip from a Storycorps interview where Tom and I recall the experience:
That was the spark of something unimaginable becoming possible.
