Reid Carr is moving his Internet marketing firm to larger quarters in East Village. Downtown, he says, cultivates the creative spirit. (photo/lambertphoto.com)

Nearly three years ago, when construction on Petco Park hit a litigation-induced standstill and naysayers were predicting a civic white elephant, Reid Carr left a cushy job with a top tech marketing firm on Sorrento Mesa to found Red Door Interactive, an Internet marketing firm. His one and only choice to locate the three-person business: Downtown. He eventually settled on the East Village frontier at 15th and J Street, far from the cozy Gaslamp Quarter that starts at Sixth Avenue.

This month Carr moves that business, now at 35 people and $2 million in annual revenue, to larger digs — still in the East Village, and still in a funky old building, this time the Blokhaus at G Street and 11th Avenue being vacated by Graham Downes Architecture.

The 28-year-old Carr wouldn’t have it any other way, and neither would his staff. “We did a survey to get the opinions of employees,” he says. “We asked, ‘If we were to move the offices, where would you want to be?’ It was unanimous for Downtown.”

In succeeding as a technology firm in an area best known for its law firms and government offices, Red Door is hardly alone. No formal data base exists to track industry sectors Downtown, but the urban core has its shares of technology-dependent firms, ranging from SimpleNet and LJG Partners to Cayenta.com and Geary Interactive and including tech funding sources such as Windward Ventures. The area’s access to bandwidth is heavily promoted but probably not overhyped. The One America Plaza office tower is smothered in a free and fast WiFi net, a phenomenon spreading throughout Downtown and one gaining national notice.

Still, it took at least a little bit of vision three years ago for Carr to move his fledgling firm to an area so edgy that even today on-street parking is usually free and not hard to find. But Carr was hooked on the urban vision. “We wanted to be in a place that was culturally significant to San Diego,” he says. “We have a deep dedication to San Diego here. We do a lot of work in the community.”

Shortly after the company moved in, funding to complete the ballpark was secured and Red Door’s headquarters location became a marketing asset.

“While (the ballpark) was still being built, everyone wanted to know about its progress,” Carr says. “It was a great way to initiate new conversations.”

Red Door builds sophisticated Web sites for businesses, and Carr highlights employee skills as “creative thinkers” over technological prowess. Clients include SkinMedia, the San Diego Convention Center Corp., Buck Knives and Sharp Systems of America, one of Red Door’s first clients.

Craig Rittenhouse, vice president of marketing for the Sharp division, recalls being a bit shocked by Carr’s business-like response when Red Door was one of several companies competing for the Sharp contract. “It became very self-evident they were not just a creative marketing company,” Rittenhouse says. “They had a lot of real life experience and were very focused on return on investment. Even at the initial proposal stage, 90 percent of what they submitted was spot-on and exactly what we needed. A lot of times with creative projects, people come up with ideas that are creative but not applicable as a business solution. Then you try to help them wind themselves down over two, three or four sessions to where you get to something that works. (Red Door’s) proposal just required a little bit of tweaking.”

The Sharp Systems’ Web site was doing about $10,000 to $20,000 in monthly business when it hired Red Door. Today, with an edgy array of flat monitors and tricky laptop computers, it is doing about $1 million a month.

“Red Door is a large part of that,” says Rittenhouse, who engages Carr in monthly brainstorming sessions where the goal is not just improving the site, but success in reaching and tracking customers.

Red Door’s Roots

A Phoenix native, Carr has long been familiar with San Diego. “You come to San Diego on vacation,” he says. He attended the University of Oregon, graduating with a bachelor’s degree from its advertising program. At school he met his wife, Amy. The couple moved to Los Angeles where they worked for separate advertising firms and he also became chief operating officer of a company that nurtured Internet startup companies.

The move to San Diego followed Amy’s landing a job at the McQuerter Group. Reid later joined McQuerter and helped establish its interactive arm. He stayed about a year before leaving to found Red Door. McQuerter’s principal, Greg McQuerter, declines to comment on Reid Carr’s departure; Carr says it was amicable and he took no clients, although some later did join his new firm. “I saw an opportunity,” Carr says of his December 2001 decision to leave. “We were looking at things in a different way and I thought I could manage it better on my own.”

The stint at McQuerter was the first time the couple worked together and they have remained a team since. Amy Carr is Red Door’s director of operations. In the new offices she gets the office at the top front right of the mezzanine while her husband’s is at the back left.

Reid Carr says the couple’s work together and familiarity with the company’s issues helps limit off-hour discussions about the office. “It helps draw a line so you don’t spend all night talking about work,” he says.

The Downtown Community

Carr attributes his confidence in Downtown to organizations like the Downtown San Diego Partnership and Centre City Development Corp. commitment to building a sense of community. “It is a good network down here, one that people in North County were not recognizing, at least then.”

He has a good relationship with his soon-to-be ex-landlord Bob Sinclair, a significant owner of East Village property.

Sinclair calls Red Door a model tenant.

“They have just been easy folks to get along with,” he says, noting they were one of a few tenants who give the landlord a Christmas present. The company’s business is a mystery to Sinclair. “I can’t begin to explain to you what they do; they have a tremendous amount of blinking red lights.”

Sinclair had hoped to be able to accommodate Red Door’s need for a larger space, but the timing of the move doesn’t work. He has already leased the Red Door space to MW Steele Group, an architectural firm run by Mark Steele.

Steele will be moving into a neighborhood slightly calmer than when Red Door arrived — “There were some interesting scenes out the front window,” Carr says — but still urban. “15th Street has always been kind of a forgotten area,” Sinclair says. “Most of my tenants down there are pretty accepting of the folks who populate the streets because most of them are just folks who have lost their way.”

The forgotten nature of 15th Street includes its ample supply of on-street parking, which Carr considers an amenity. Ballpark traffic was never an issue, although the patterns did teach him some tricks, like using the Imperial Avenue freeway entrance. “People really haven’t picked up on that yet,” he says. “Now that we are moving, I can say that.”

The progress of the ballpark has some parallels with the Red Door business plan. On Petco’s opening night, Carr says he too was ready to proclaim some measure of success. “It was around that time that we really felt like we’d made it,” he says. “The fireworks that night meant a little bit more to us.”

For other firms considering a 92101 address, Carr offers the following counsel. “Downtown typifies and cultivates the creative spirit by offering people an outlet when at work rather than a fixed process or destination,” he says. “If a company wants to come down here, it should consider what kind of people its employees are and the kind of employees it wants to attract. It is a different culture down here, one that encourages excitement and discovery rather than utility and practicality.”