My relationship with Pepe International was an interesting journey. I met Rich Pepe in 2005 when I had my marketing agency in Monterey, CA. The first project I worked on was his website, and he quickly became my bigget client. Pepe was one of those guys that just had a million irons in the fire and was only lacking someone who could take them and do something with them. I became that guy. Over the next seven years, I worked on numerous websites, did all the marketing and created brands for several restaurants, wine bars, a bakery, several wine companies, and a line of bread, pasta sauce and snack nuts. I even worked on the film crew for a reality TV show pilot called “Peace of Cake” with Joe Pantoliano which was interesting to say the least.

In 2011 is when it got really interesting, Pepe tossed me the keys to the vacant old Pivetti building in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and challenged me to help him build a new restaurant. Now when you walk into Vesuvio, you’ll see a wall that’s a full recreation of the Villa Dei Misteri, and several other frescos from the ancient ruins of Pompeii, and a restaurant that I spent 8 months helping to create from the ground up. The new restaurant became a showcase for all the brands I helped build over those seven years, including the wines and cocktail brands.

EADS was in need of interactive multimedia, and the print collateral to accompany the CD-ROMs that were being duplicated by the thousands.

I designed both interactive multimedia and print design for Philips, including airport diorama advertisements.

Agilent Technologies was the first million-dollar project that I was ever in charge of landing. After the current Art Director utterly failed to deliver what the client wanted, we nearly lost the account. I stepped up and asked the client for one shot at saving the account and I ended up with 24 hours to create 10 mockups. When we walked into the Agilent offices the next day, I hadn’t slept all night but we nailed the presentation. We began developing a ten-module interactive training system a week later. It was a defining moment in my career–I was literally sleeping at the office and eating out of the vending machine to the tune of 100-hour weeks, but we created some innovative multimedia for it’s time and changed the way Agilent trained it’s network of dealers 🙂