04/20/2026
40 years of agency life: ELLE Magazine.
The agency was fortunate to call ELLE Magazine a client from the early to mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Beyond what our founder and creative director, Dana Kelley, recalls anecdotally, we still have documents, notes and letters pertaining to ELLE’s work and how the agency team at the time managed the workload. It was intensive and pressure-packed, albeit meaningful and fulfilling, too, resulting in great outcomes between agency and client.
There was one week each month, coined “ELLE Week,” during which the ELLE team would come to Jonesboro to collaborate with the agency team as the magazine was printed. Many of those work days extended well past midnight.
The work done for ELLE involved varying degrees of photography, color separations, photo editing, layout, typography and more as needed. During these years, our agency had a state-of-the-art Crosfield Drum Scanner, which allowed for separating CMYK colors from film photography to then be edited in the early versions of Photoshop for editing to ELLE Magazine publication quality.
We have a June 1994 edition of ELLE Magazine in our office—in its original plastic packaging, too. Hillary Clinton, FLOTUS at the time, was featured in this edition, and the agency was actually tasked with the color separation and photo editing of her images. The photo edit requests were marked with red ink on a copy of the original.
There are several fragrance ads with unopened fragrance strips, though we peeled one back to test. Scent’s alive and well! One of which, Christian Dior’s “Tendre Poison,” was discontinued many years ago, now only to be experienced at TSG!
This was a mutually beneficial relationship that ended only until ELLE Magazine changed ownership.
