The Story: Taking a Step Back to the Roots of Freshly Pressed

Believe it or not, founder Lindsy Mueller began Freshly Pressed as a side-gig back in 2001 as a freshman in college.  Back then, it was as simple as building a website for her sister’s wedding as a way to keep family members in touch with everyone since they were spread out from coast to coast (remember Geocities??). 

In fact, I remember clearly when I saw the very first website advertised on a TV commercial: It was for Pepsi – I think I was around 13 years old – back in the AOL days. I thought, “Yep, I need to get into doing something creative with the internet – this is going to be huge one day.” But again, a degree in marketing didn’t cover anything remotely close to what digital marketing is today at the time I was in college at the University of Georgia.

I never really “knew” what it is I wanted to do. I wanted to be creative, tell people about great things, and connect them without having to get in the car or pick up the phone. It should be easy – Google was gaining ground, and heck, the fact that we could site internet sites finally in papers said something about the future of where we would rely on getting our information.

I first pursued a degree in landscape architecture (you know, the freshman naive “dream” to do whatever sounds fun), then quickly transferred to biology/nursing, then dabbled with obtaining a degree in business, but finally landed in dietetics (for those of you that don’t know, think nutritionist, R.D., dietitian). Why? Well, it was simple. The marketing degree route covered low-tech: Microsoft Access. Really!? That’s the only “tech” course offered in the degree program? There has to be a better way without having to be shut in a dungeon learning programming with the computer science folks that wanted to make chips and processors. I wanted to make things pretty online. Make them informative. User friendly.

Even though Facebook hadn’t been invented yet, here was this whole digital age happening, and marketing as it was being taught just seemed so, well, old-school. (Note: Facebook was finally available at UGA by the time I graduated, but it was still the new MySpace.)

So I charted my own path learning the ins and outs of the web design taking on side projects for friends and family to continue to learn on my own while juggling working full-time, and dealing with microbiology, organic chemistry, anatomy/physiology, and food science courses. After all, if the internet didn’t work out, I needed a fallback, and everyone needs to eat well (Yet another place in which I was ahead of the curve. Wellness and eating for prevention didn’t really take off until 2010 or so. Right place. Wrong time.)

So, I earned my degree in dietetics, and continued to self-educate while taking jobs here and there (after all, 2008 happened not long after graduation). Finally, it all came together when I co-owned a restaurant who’s owners didn’t even know what a website was. And, they really didn’t think “any of this website or Facebook stuff” would work. They had rack cards and pens with the name on it. THAT was marketing to them. To be fair, that was marketing to a lot of people at the time.

This was the big break. I built a website for the restaurant (nothing like what we see today, but the first of its kind in the town), re-worked the menus to pull in some menu science and add the website and Facebook page links, started/managed the Facebook page, and began to take traditional marketing methods and apply them in the online world. Low and behold, we were able to turn profits around nearly by 100% and sell the restaurant in six months – all thanks to merging the online with the offline worlds.

Fast forward to 11 years later and I’ve been able to help many business owners and professionals harness the power of digital marketing for their own businesses. Now with a team of amazing creatives at the ready, Freshly Pressed can offer digital marketing to clients who otherwise would not be able to retain a large agency. We create customer experiences that tie the offline efforts with the online community – every plan with the same foundation, yet a unique approach. This is the key – customization and personalization for the client, vertical, customer, and goal. The rest, well, it’s history.