About Me
I’m a serial entrepreneur and have always been for as long as I can remember. When I was in elementary school, I used to make and sell bookmarks in 3rd grade, in middle school, hand made stickers, and in high school, custom printed silk-screened T-shirts along with stickers and other propaganda which eventually made it onto lockers and other areas of school.
I’ve always been into art and have continued drawing and sketching from when I was a little kid. Although I’ve taken some classes, I’m mostly a self taught traditional artist and graphic artist. Much of my past art was as an airbrusher where I gained thousands of hours and experience working at a T-shirt shop in beautiful Coronado.
From the T-shirt shop, I created Unchained Graphix, a clothing line and custom screenprinting shop back in 1991 with several partners. We ended up going national and international with our clothing line. At the end of 1996, we disbanded as a company, I took over and eventually created Planet Apparel, a rebranded and refocused custom silkscreen, embroidery, and promotional products company with my mother. In 2009, we successfully sold the company to another silkscreen company where then I could focus on web design full time.
In the many years of business, I became a fontographer, web designer, photoshop artist and web marketing strategist.
I’m now the CEO of Digithrive, Inc. a San Diego based web company designing custom websites for businesses and specializing in WordPress themeing.
I do my part in the San Diego tech community by running RefreshSD a monthly local web user group held at Qualcomm once a month. I also help run BarCampSD since its inception which attracts 250+ people over the event weekends. I help bring sponsors to the table for the successful events like Cool As Ever Tech I and II that attracted 600 local San Diegans to a private event at the Del Mar Race track. As of January 2010 I put together SDTechScene.org, a calendar of San Diego tech events which include all the local tech groups.
Noted Accomplishments:
- Owned and operated a T-shirt printing business in San Diego for 18 years and successfully sold it off to another company in 2008.
- Once worked a forty hour day for a client project. Started at 8:00 am in the morning and completed it midnight the next night.
- In the hay day of pogs, designed a set of them for a client. The final production run was 1 million
Connect with me:
- Twitter: @imagium
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/phelanriessen
- FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/phelan.riessen
