Stewart closes Aspen Marketing & Design

Aspen Marketing & Design, a major player among local marketing and advertising firms for a dozen years, shut its doors for good last month.Sheila Stewart, the founder and sole owner, began winding business down and helping clients relocate early last year, after she moved to Portland, Ore.Stewart, who now goes by the last name of Bunnell, has taken over as director of Bradshaw Advertising in Portland. The job is second in command after the company president, and she is responsible for overseeing all of the artistic and account work that goes on at the agency.The move marks a significant change for Stewart, who spent the past 12 years scrambling to keep her business in business. But the new digs aren’t entirely unfamiliar, either, as she spent her pre-Aspen career as an account executive at industry giant DDB Needham in New York City.Aspen Marketing & Design typically employed five or six people and averaged “well over” $1 million in annual billings, Stewart said. At Bradshaw, she oversees 20 employees who manage accounts worth more than $20 million a year in billings, according to creativepro.com. The Web site lists information about advertising firms from around the nation.”I don’t have to be head chef and bottle washer here, which is what I was before,” she said in a telephone interview earlier this week.Bradshaw Advertising represents national and regional clients from its Portland offices, including Miller Paints, the largest Subaru dealer in the United States, and the developer who is heading up a major redevelopment project near downtown Portland.When she left, Stewart also took a few of her clients with her – firms of local, regional or national scope. But her departure has also created new opportunities for other local marketing and advertising firms.Gallagher Sharp West, for instance, was recently named as the new marketing and public relations firm for the Hotel Jerome, a major account long held by Aspen Marketing & Design.”It’s not often that an account comes along that lets you be their full marketing support partner, which we’ll be able to do with the Hotel Jerome. It’s a rare opportunity,” said RJ Gallagher, a partner in Gallagher Sharp West.For Gallagher, in fact, the Hotel Jerome account represents something of a homecoming. In the mid-1980s, he was the vice president of marketing for Dick Butera, the developer who revamped the old, rundown Hotel Jerome and turned it into a world-class hotel.@ATD Sub heds:Business and family@ATD body copy:Stewart moved to Aspen from New York City 13 years ago with her husband, Jim, and daughters Kelly and Dana. After a year in town, she returned to her professional passion and training by opening Aspen Marketing & Design.Stewart and her daughters remained in Aspen after Jim died of cancer in 1998. While Kelly and Dana finished at Aspen High School and found colleges to attend, Sheila devoted much of her time and energy to her company.Her niche in the local market was having a clientele that was largely from somewhere else. She was often on the road meeting with clients, overseeing production of their annual reports and other marketing materials.Aspen Marketing and Design, for its last few years in business, netted about 70 percent of its revenue from companies based outside the valley.One large client, for instance, was Barrett Resources, a Denver-based energy concern that used Aspen Marketing & Design to put together its annual report, a critical part of any company’s investor relations strategy. Several other energy companies also tapped Stewart and her staff for advertising and marketing support.In a story published two years ago in The Aspen Times Weekly, Stewart said she courted publicly traded companies, like Barrett Resources, partly because that’s where her experience lay as an account representative in New York.But Stewart was also a player in the local market. In addition to the Hotel Jerome, Aspen Marketing & Design’s client list over the years included Little Annie’s Restaurant, the Aspen Club Lodge, the Aspen Music School and Festival, and the real estate and property management firm Coates, Reid and Waldron.”In Aspen, to be successful you need to be very diversified,” Stewart said. “You can’t rely on one or two large accounts because if there is a falling out or you lose an account for some reason, you’re vulnerable.”After Dana, the youngest of Sheila and Jim’s daughters, graduated from Aspen High and moved to Los Angeles to attend college, Sheila and her second husband, Loren Bunnell, moved to Portland.She began commuting back and forth to Aspen. But she found herself spending less time in her new home with her husband than desired, and finally decided to close Aspen Marketing & Design.”It’s difficult to be an absentee owner. You can’t stay on top of everything that was going on at the office,” she said.Her new office at Bradshaw is in a Victorian-era colonial home in the heart of Portland. She looks out at the city from a large office that has one of the building’s eight fireplaces.So far, thanks to the meteorological phenomena known as El Nio, Sheila and her husband have had nothing but great weather. “It’s sunny and 60 degrees today,” she said. “They say it rains, but frankly I haven’t seen a lot.”@ATD Sub heds:The dumbest guy at the meeting@ATD body copy:Aspen Marketing & Design’s largest local account, the Hotel Jerome, looked long and hard at firms in and out of the area before settling on Gallagher Sharp West.According to Stewart, Gallagher Sharp West’s experience in resort marketing and its long local presence helped seal the deal.”Of all the major hotels in Aspen, the Hotel Jerome does the most marketing,” Stewart said. “It’s a fairly demanding account, and I wish RJ the best.”RJ Gallagher and Dorothy West, the principals at Gallagher Sharp West, will be dealing with one of lodging’s most savvy and experienced hotel management teams in town. Between them, general manager Tony DiLucia and marketing director Jinna Francis have decades of experience at the Hotel Jerome.What makes the account so demanding is that the Hotel Jerome uses its local marketing and advertising firm to put together its entire marketing package, from electronic media to cocktail napkins to event planning to public relations. At other top-notch hotels, many of the key marketing and campaign decisions are made in-house or at a larger advertising firm.Gallagher said his office has put together a team to handle all the work an account like the Hotel Jerome demands.”We’ve already been working a lot with them – and I’m the dumbest guy in the meeting,” Gallagher said. “It’s an exciting time now, at the beginning of our relationship, because there are no wrong answers, yet. The budget hasn’t hurt, yet.”