Past, Present, Future…

I wanted to give everyone who visits our website a little background about Rainfire Media and my roots in the web design industry. I’m Rick Romano Founder of Rainfire Media. It all started in San Francisco California in 1992. I moved to San Francisco, the Multimedia center of the universe at the time,  looking for opportunities in Multimedia CD Rom production. Of course, with no experience in the industry at the time, I did not find the right opportunity straight away to pursue my dreams. So I landed at Aspen Graphics, a print production service bureau as a salesman in the advertising district of San Francisco.

The following year in 1993 the Internet came into the forefront of the World with the release of the Netscape browser. This immediately caught my attention and I pitched the first website design to KFOG Radio the #1 Contemporary Rock Station in the Bay Area and I landed the contract. This was my big break.

We designed the FogNet the first radio station website to win multiple awards in the Radio industry. We then landed 10 more radio stations and AspenMedia was born in 1994. We picked up Yahoo! as a client in 1995 and I was lucky enough to be the lead designer for the Yahoo! logo and business brand identity. Yahoo! then contracted AspenMedia to design and build the first website portals for Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Entertainment and Yahoo! Jobs. At that time in San Francisco the Internet business was booming and I found myself running a company with over 65 people, 100 clients and working with innovative leaders of the Internet industry. We helped many startup companies build their first websites, Yahoo!, ZipCityUSA, Excite Networks, Grocery.com, many of which are no longer with us but this shaped my ability to be innovative and a forward thinker.

The Dot Com bust of 1999 hit our business pretty hard. In 2000, I we consolidated the company and I bought out my 3 partners and moved the AspenMedia operations to Irvine in Orange County, California. I established a new market niche for the business in the booming real estate industry. We launched a new business Pacific Vantage Real Estate and helped them to build a team of over 300 agents in the first 6 months of operations. We where the agency of record for Keller Williams in Orange County with over 3,000 agents. I then purchased a print production company to service the Real Estate direct print marketing campaigns and successfully ran the organization for another 11 years.

Making Our Way to Florida!

In 2010 I decided to close AspenMedia due to the downward turn of the economy. I was offer a position at VitaCost in Boca Raton Florida as the Vice President Internet Services to develop their ecommerce business model into 6 new major categories. After successfully developing a strategy, implementing the development and building a team to support it an outside opportunity developed and I decided to make a move in 2012. I started Rainfire Media as I transitioned out of VitaCost corporate business after landing a substantial contract with a startup business in the Golf industry. We picked up several more clients along the way and have been building the Rainfire Media business ever since.

Through all of these years, I have been able to continue to learn new technologies and build new solutions to cater to the challenges in mobile technology and web application development. Rainfire Media currently maintains a senior staff of leading designers, developers and marketers build on over 25 years of my personal experience and guidance.

The story continues into 2020 and I look forward to learning all about your business, your projects and your goals as they apply to digital design and Internet marketing.

Let’s build something extraordinary together!