Let’s go barefoot.

It was 1994. People were talking about the World Wide Web. This thing called the hyperlink was big. And an ex-P&G employee had a vision for a boutique agency that only cared about two things: creativity and results. There would be room for nothing else.

So he and the first employees made desks by throwing a door over two filing cabinets and got to work. It was the ethos a new kind of agency would need, lean and nimble – a startup before startup was a thing.

The agency would need to be obsessed with the work – not with the trappings and clichés of conventional agencies. No Barcelona chairs in the lobby, no designer chandelier in the conference room and no $500 shoes. They would need to be… barefoot.

Success breeds buyers. And Proximity Worldwide came calling in 2008. A master of one-to-one marketing, the sister network of BBDO was the perfect match. Eleven years on, Barefoot Proximity has 170 talented people following in our founder’s footsteps – and very closely too, since he was recently named CEO of Proximity Worldwide.