Free Range Studios

In 1999 two lifelong friends, Jonah Sachs and Louis Fox, faced a dilemma. Since childhood, they had been locked in creative collaboration -- creating games, writing stories, shooting films. But as adults, needing to sell these skills to survive, something was consistently getting lost. Creating commercial messages that manipulated audiences rather than informed them sucked the joy out of the creative process. From where they stood, the choice seemed to be between creativity on the one hand and integrity on the other.

Hoping to achieve some kind of balance, Jonah and Louis searched for a loophole and they found one: The eureka moment came when they discovered that progressive organizations were not getting access to the kind of creative services that large corporations use every day to massively influence culture. As technological change rapidly put the means of production into the hands of regular people, why, they asked, couldn't they offer top-level media services to organizations that couldn't muster top-level budgets? They set out to try, and Free Range Studios was born.

The response was almost immediate as groups pushing for progressive change noticed Free Range's print materials and early Flash movies, which were making their rounds on the Internet. As demand grew for a firm that worked exclusively for a progressive future, so did the need for like-minded creative geniuses to build the vision. When former client McArthur signed on as Free Range's first employee, the simple collaboration of two friends took on the shape of a design and strategy firm that would create the Internet's most effective activism movies and be at the center of hundreds of key campaigns for social change in print and on the Web.

Today, Free Range is a thriving full-service firm with 23 full-time staff members and offices in Washington, D.C. (our first home) and Berkeley, CA. The solution to a creative dilemma of two childhood friends has provided a home for a team of inspired, conscientious professionals and an invaluable resource to those working for progressive social change.