Homecoming Part 1: How Our Past Paved the Way for Our Move to Noblesville, Indiana
This is Part 1 in a three-part series exploring the history of 12 Stars Media and our move to our permanent home in Noblesville.
The scene opens on a small city square at lunchtime. An ornate courthouse with limestone spires and sloped red roofs. Lining the main streets of the square, a series of narrow buildings stacked side-by-side, wall-to-wall. People walk in and out of a small cafe, which is packed to the brim with plates and sandwiches and hungry locals gathering to network, to share, to break bread together.
These are the trappings of Greenfield, Indiana—the seat of Hancock County, but quaint nonetheless. It was in a loft above that busy cafe that in 2009 Rocky Walls and Zach Downs moved into the first official home of 12 Stars Media. They didn’t know it yet, but their decision to open that office in the heart of Greenfield would set the tone for their work for years to come.
“We’d been working from home for one and a half, maybe two years at that point,” says Rocky. “We were ready to put ourselves fully into this vision of telling stories with real, simple video.”
It might be hard to imagine today, in a world where most people have a high-quality camera and hi-def screen in their pockets, but video was a novel idea for many businesses a decade or so ago. More than that, the ever-connected nature of today’s social media was just getting its start. Where today’s entrepreneurs may turn to the web to begin networking and growing their businesses, Rocky and Zach were very much rooted in place.
“When we first started in Greenfield, our goal was to connect with and promote local businesses,” says Zach. “We felt that creating videos about these local spots would be a great way to share their stories with more people.”
In other words, 12 Stars Media started with a focus on how video could connect the people of Greenfield. And so they went out into that community, hauling cameras and equipment down the stairs and out into the streets, and carrying it right back up to get to work editing and sharing the stories they uncovered.
Rocky remembers, “That lunch spot downstairs, The Bread Ladies, was really where I began building my professional network. It’s where I first learned the value of building community to support business.” So, it was only natural for Rocky to reach out to The Bread Ladies and offer to feature them in a video. There, in the cafe just down the stairs, Rocky and Zach shared the story of Donna, the owner of the restaurant, and the role she played in bringing people together with her baked goods and fresh meals.
Before you watch this, remember it was ten years ago and fully-produced by the very young and inexperienced Rocky and Zach. :)
“Of course, it was low hanging fruit,” Zach says through some laughter. “I’m sure we did that first video for free, or in exchange for rent—Donna was our landlady, after all. But theirs was the kind of story we were interested in telling. It was all about craft, all about sharing your passion with your community, about bringing people together.”
As many small business owners understand, however, that low hanging fruit was the first major step along a path that has led 12 Stars Media to the company it is today. The unique and compelling video about The Bread Ladies attracted the attention of the Indianapolis Star, which observed the team on their next production at Second Seasons Consignment Shop down the road. When word got out, other businesses in town started to take notice.
“When you imagine the kinds of businesses in a small town like Greenfield, you think of shops like Hometown Comics,” Rocky says. “The shop was owned by a couple who had moved into town and thought the community needed a good comic shop, so they opened one. We were super excited to be asked by the owners to produce a video and share their story.”
Alongside their local work, exposure from the Indy Star and social media meetups like Indy Social Media helped 12 Stars Media begin partnerships with organizations throughout the Indianapolis area who saw the passion the team brought to every project. Even as the team began preparing for their first big move from Greenfield to their next home in Fishers, they were beginning work with larger organizations like The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and The Tony Stewart Foundation. But as their client base grew and social media began to make video a more regular and more accessible part of life, one thread tied together every project: Community.
“What I loved about the videos we made in those early days, and what we’re still doing now, is the way a video could bring people together in a physical place and build real, physical community,” Zach says. “We’ve produced tons of video intended to go on a website or on Facebook, but what’s most remarkable to me is the way a video can generate discussion face-to-face, bring people together in a new way.”
In the video below, Rocky reflects on how twelve years in business has molded and shaped their team's vision and paved the way for their most recent move.
The company’s tenure in Fishers began just as social media started to explode and businesses were taking notice of video’s potential to engage and compel their viewers online. It was in that spirit that 12 Stars Media debuted Candidio, their editing-on-demand service. Then, anyone in the world could send the team their raw video clips and some basic instructions, then get their very own professionally-edited video.
As their list of clients grew and demand for Candidio services continued to increase, Rocky and Zach quickly found themselves a far cry from that tiny loft above the cafe in Greenfield. There were new visions for a much larger organization, complete with unique marketing, sales, and production departments and all the trappings of a large agency. Ten employees soon became more than twenty, and the team made one last short-term move to their offices in the heart of the Nickel Plate District in Fishers in 2015.
But even as the numbers increased all around—numbers of team members, of clients, of dollars coming in every month—Rocky and Zach couldn’t escape the sense that their vision of telling powerful stories with simple videos was getting lost in all the noise. Zach says, “We were spending a lot of time just figuring out who we wanted to be. How we wanted to operate. Back in Greenfield, we thought it would be so nice to have this huge company and get to travel the world making videos. We got all of that. But we also realized that we really got the most joy from making videos for organizations that are making a real difference.”
“Something I kept coming back to is this idea that we’ve got an abundance of the word ‘community’ but we have a severe deficit of real community,” says Rocky. “I found myself coaching clients that they shouldn’t be producing videos with the mindset that people have short attention spans. I wanted to make videos that would be seen by the right people, that would lead to real discussions and real change. So even before we began thinking about buying a space all our own, we started making some adjustments to the size of our team, and to the kind of projects we were working on.”
In many ways, the clarity of vision Rocky and Zach gained from their experiences growing 12 Stars Media into the company it is today came full circle when they finally realized it was time to move again—but this time to a place they could truly make their own. “We wanted to be back in a place that felt like a real community,” says Rocky.
With that in mind, the team turned their sights to downtown Noblesville and the work of finding a home where they could grow their own community, their own way.
