Just before the dot-com boom, in 1999, an 18-year-old high school student, Justin Murphy, and two friends had the crazy idea to start a website design company. They named it America In Design and launched with just a few local clients in the rural suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Then came the call from a New York lawyer. He had the audacious idea to go toe-to-toe with Swiss, Austrian, and German banks on behalf of Holocaust survivors, primarily those of Jewish descent. In the decades following the Holocaust, these families sought the return of treasured heirlooms, money, and art that Nazis had looted and hidden in secret bank accounts. But because of longstanding tradition and a 1934 law, the banks refused to help survivors reclaim their property or even to reveal the names of account holders. 

In late 2000, the banks finally settled the case, and families across the world rejoiced. The case went down in the history books as one of the most monumental international lawsuits. Today, you can visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and find articles chronicling the case. While there, you may even meet one of the countless visitors impacted by its success.

The following year, we launched a series of international websites enabling families across the world to join the suit. Because these websites were advertised in nearly every major newspaper (the printed kind!) with content in twenty different languages, our team of three was overwhelmed with a daily barrage of new information to post. Read from right to left; Yiddish and Hebrew proved especially challenging! We thought: there must be an easier way to post new content to the web than manual programming—and that’s when Backstage was born. As one of the earliest content management systems, Backstage enabled our team to copy and paste new text into the website easily.

Many years (and updates) later, Backstage continues to allow business owners to manage their sites on their own. Today it powers online communications and training for an international airport, educates K-12 online students across all 50 states, and helps families in our community learn about programs that enrich their lives through arts and culture.

College called and the small company, now owned by Justin, moved to Greenville, South Carolina with him. Soon a small, second-floor office became the company's first permanent home. That was quickly outgrown, forcing another move as the company expanded it's offerings of website design and software development to become a full-fledged agency that included branding, video production, and digital marketing. In 2006, we rebranded ourselves and officially became "Your Creative People," a marketing, communications, and technology agency.

After being in business for almost ten years, it was essential to our leadership to define not just what we were—but the “why” behind what we do. We carefully selected seven core values that we believed, in combination, made YCP unique:

• Excellence

• Creativity

• Dependability

• Partnership

• Integrity

• Teamwork

• Fun

Instead of hanging these new values on our walls, we wanted them to be pre-eminent in our thinking, so our values would influence how we serve our clients. That’s when our tagline, Thinking Differently, was born. Only by thinking differently can YCP create unconventional approaches that cause our clients’ customers to think differently and consider their brands.

YCP had been creating videos for several years but on a small scale. As the leading video post-production studio in the region, the work of Skyline Post had been seen on TV for many years through commercials for Home Depot, Ryobi, Verizon, and the Carolina Panthers. After a long friendship and a brief consulting stint, Skyline Post joined the YCP family. The acquisition not only increased YCP’s capabilities with high-end gear but it brought a team of talented, highly experienced industry experts. Today, our team has filmed along the sunny beaches of South Florida and the Bahamas and the revered halls of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Walmart.com and Target.com have both featured commercials that 
we created.

We partnered to create ProDogTV an award-winning original docuseries that follows the true stories of hero dogs and their handlers through police chases, detecting bombs in Iraq, and even helping a handicapped girl take her first steps. We’ve got a whole slew of stories ahead of us. After learning about the amazing things professional working dogs do, we decided to join forces with John to create season 1 of this 7-time award-winning show.

Watch the Free Episode 1