Relative obscurity isn’t an issue you’d expect to run into 22 years into business.

The market we operate in at Electric Pulp isn’t fixed. It’s not geographic or tied to any single industry — it’s fluid, or, maybe more specifically, it follows the fluid mechanics of sand. As the years / decades have gone by and opportunities have called us out, we’ve shifted along with the industries and geographic locations and the dunes we’re caught up in.

For Electric Pulp, keeping up with the shifting landscape has been more a story of evolving and improving than it has been of digging in or growing. We’ve seen 22 years of gain without driving deep stakes in the ground or focusing heavily on a single geographic market or industry. We’ve developed relationships with global brands and well-known lifestyle retailers and have been able to work with most of the major auto manufacturers from an all-but-hidden office in Sioux Falls, SD, in relative obscurity.

STAKES
The only constant is change, and it’ll pull you along in its wake if you don’t stay on top of it. One of the side effects of evolving to keep up with a shifting market has been losing some of our prior shape here at home. We took a quick fix in a convenient but hidden location to gain some office space for growth and just never got back downtown. And then eleven years went by.

I have a mental image of a storybook protagonist sitting down to focus on work and then being slowly covered and concealed by 11 years of plant growth.

In writing this, we wanted to show that there’s more to our story than simple success driving good change. The web has plenty of press releases telling how an agency is killing it and decided to level up in one way or another. The reality is that there are usually more layered (and interesting) considerations in play.

One of those considerations for us is that we travel consistently to a few geographic markets, and there’s a strong business case for driving a stake or two into the ground in those locations. The need here at home goes further, though. We need to shake off some of our camouflage and show more of a sense of who we are. Get out of the wake. Maybe even practice thumping our chest a bit. One of my favorite clients keeps telling us that. We have “Midwestern ethics to a fault,” he says. I don’t know that it’s an, “aw shucks” personality or a ‘sitting down to focus’ decision or a go-with-the-flow adaptability that’s led to it, but there are people right here at home who probably don’t even know who we are.

We have relationships with great clients here in Sioux Falls. Longstanding clients, new clients, active clients, and clients we could do more for. We even have aspirational clients in our backyard who aren’t actually clients at all. In other words, we have work to do here. We’ve evolved around a shifting, distributed market, and our local presence isn’t what it should be.

This is a really long way of saying we’re setting up a new office in downtown Sioux Falls. Suite 404 is nearing completion in the new Washington Square building and should be ready for launch at the end of April.

Go ahead and get your 404 jokes out. (A 404 Not Found error is a standard response code that means a file can’t be found on the server.) Work was done and strings were pulled to get us that suite number. Probably, 301 (Moved Permanently) is the number we should have been going for, but third floor is a parking garage, and we have certain needs. 404 is more than a fun conversation opener for geeks — it’s a good reminder to make ourselves findable, regardless of how we evolve.

As you can imagine, we’re excited about our new space. Our collective energy is buzzing. We’re looking forward to being there. We’re looking forward to doing more and showing more and having that build on itself. We’re excited for our space to be more reflective of our business, and we’re excited have people in it. I don’t know that we’ll be hanging out thumping our chests, but we’re going to be working hard on our presence.

This is just a first step. We hope you’ll come see us.