The History of Bridge Road Marketing

Adam & Heather Korte, owners of Bridge Road Marketing, at the French Laundry, Yountville, CA, on their 10th wedding anniversary. 

Hi,

I’m Adam Korte and I built Bridge Road Marketing.  I’ve been pretty obsessed with computers my entire life.  My family got its first computer around 1992.  It was a Gateway that came in the “cow’ box.  I had never realized the irony of us getting a “Holstein” branded computer, living in Wisconsin, but that’s how it happened.  This was ABSOLUTELY huge for me, and as a teenage boy of course went to work pirating as many games as I possibly could!

Through copying games, I learned a lot of functions on the command line that loosely translates to the Linux work I do today. The power of computing has always intrigued me, and once I started seeing what could be done when you hooked multiple computers together…  my mind was truly blown! I wanted to do this! I “played” with computers in all of my free time!

A bunch of life stuff irrelevant to Bridge Road Marketing went on, blah, blah, blah……

In 2005 I moved to Milwaukee as I was accepted to Nursing School at UWM as I was still undecided about what I wanted to do with myself.  In nursing school, I seemed to do nothing but work on websites.  To this day I don’t know why it never occurred to me to pursue schooling in technology or computer science.  Oh, yeah if forgot to mention, I met that lovely lady, a partner in crime, and co-owner of Bridge Road Marketing, in the picture above while working at Osteria Del Mondo. during 2005.

In 2006 family friend Tim Barnes had caught wind of the fact I was “fooling around with websites” and got ahold of me.  “yo, Adam, I hear you’re building websites?  Any chance you can build an online catalog?, asked Tim”  To which I replied, “I’ve never done it before, but let me see what I can find.”

I found Magento, and boy am I glad I did.  Magento as many of you readers likely know became the most popular large-scale eCommerce platform, and was purchased by eBay in 2011, and again by Adobe in 2018.  I spent 1yr building Jusdust.com, jusfilters.com, and jusdust.org for Tim Barnes.  And working with Magento was HARD!!!

Click Image to View Larger

Here’s Bridge Road Marketing’s first-ever Magento site build…

… Surely there’s a lot more to the story, but after that, the Magento jobs just kept coming!  They do to this day.  Through the very challenging Magento learning process, I more or less taught myself LAMP development, which has carried over to Bridge Road Marketing custom configuring 2 dedicated servers, which is where we host sites today.  I have developed a VAST network of extremely talented contractors and resources.

Funktional Design Studios

Funktional Design Studios was the first rendition of Bridge Road Marketing.  Founded in 2007 this was my first business.  As is still the case, the focus with small business websites, content management based, using Joomla, WordPress, and eCommerce with Magento.  Over time we WordPress became more robust, and we phased out Joomla in favor of WordPress.

Ultimately we identified the term FunKtional was just creating too much confusion with customers, and it was time for a change.

Bridge Road Marketing

Bridge Road Marketing become our official name in 2014.  We’ve rebranded things in 2019 and you read this article as part of our 2021 rebrand.  Technology, design styles, customer expectations all change regularly in this game so we are looking to stick to a rebrand or refresh of the site every 2 years.  A self (re)evaluation.

“Very early on I realized that when the customer makes more money we make more money.  That is always the #1 goal.”

Bridge Road Marketing paved the way to a much larger presence in the industry.  At some point in 2014 I had reached critical mass in terms of doing all the work that was coming in.  This is when Bridge Road Marketing began becoming what it is today.  We started building a reliable, hardworking, and diverse network of contractors who shared our views of putting out a quality product at a fair price.  In doing so we were also able to fill talent gaps and offer new services.

Today our focus really is total business processes.  We’ve worked in so many different industries and seen so many different methods that we can increase efficiency & identify new markets in almost any sector.

Very early on I realized that when the customer makes more money we make more money.  So that is always the #1 goal.

I hope this helped provide a glimpse of what we’re all about and what we’ve built here.  I hope to have the chance to work with you soon!

Sincerely,

Adam Korte
Owner, Bridge Road Marketing
Bridgeroadmarketing.com
Office 414-52-BRAND
Cell 414-555-555 (redacted, you know because online and spam and everything 🙂