1/ A story of chance.

One of our biggest "breaks" for CTC started with a BBQ.

@tylermerrick and @Project7 were a client and he had a friend who was a marketing director for @thenorthface over for an afternoon hang.

He mentioned us and stuck his neck out to connect us...

2/ TNF was launching a new line called "Urban Exploration" with a flagship store in SF.

We got a chance to pitch them on a concept to expand the customer experience beyond the store.

(A few select slides from our pitch)

3/ They loved the idea of partnering with some local "Urban Explorers" and content creators to design the interior of the store and a build a follow on microsite that would outline an "underground map" of the city. From there we could re-market users and drive them to buy online.

4/ So @IainACHarris and the then "Hype Media" team spent three days climbing through sewers, climbing rooftops, searching through "bandos" with some of the craziest people over.

The pics were...

5/ The video was bonkers...

6/ And the ad performance off of the microsite was just crazy!

But....

7/ As soon as we launched we received a C&D from the city of San Francisco for trespassing.

They threatened a lawsuit and TNF shut the whole thing down immediately.

We were crushed.

8/ After that final meeting in SF, @IainACHarris and I sat together at a Chilli's in the Oakland airport, we were devastated but grabbed a few beers and started dreaming together about how we could do more stuff like this in the future...

a month later we acquired Hype Media

9/ CTC was transformed through that failure. I got a best friend, a partner and a new vision for who we would become.

This journey is never linear, you never know where a break might come from.

Keep going.