I had cache in the attic during Covid with my web design company

A love of sports and fitness has helped David Kieran to grow his Dundalk-based creative agency from strength to strength.

He studied business at Dublin City University, specialising in marketing and graduating in 2013. After a stint working for his father’s plant hire business he headed off travelling with his girlfriend, now wife, Fiona.

He worked as a brand manager for a building maintenance company in Vancouver before taking up a sales role with a poster company in the US. That allowed the couple to criss-cross the country selling posters to students decorating their dorms.

After a tour of Central America they returned to Ireland and set up Marketing for Me in late 2016, providing web design and digital marketing services to businesses in the northeast.

He started out in his parents’ attic. “I turned it into a small office with a whiteboard on the wall. I told myself I had to do one website a month, so that was the starting point,” he says.

That brought him in about €1,000 a month. “Luckily my wife was a primary school teacher, so we had a steady income.”

He began by asking friends and family for work. “Then I started working with local businesses and it grew from there.” By 2017 he was doing three websites a month and had a clear sense of further opportunities for growth by adding more digital services to his web design work.

But to do that he needed help, which luckily enough was right next door. Chris Brennan, a graphic designer who also his childhood friend and neighbour, came on board in 2018 as creative director.

By the following year Kieran had more than 500 companies on his books and a Business All-Star award under his belt. The pair were subsequently joined by Richard Naylor, a local videographer, who become visual content director in 2021, just as the business changed its name to Zoma.

At the time all three were still working out of Kieran’s attic and, a bit like the cobbler’s children, were poorly shod when it came to the business’s own corporate identity, despite all the successful work they were doing for others.

“When you’re starting out you just want to get money in. But we knew it was time to build a brand,” he says.

The first thing they did was change the name, to Zoma, which means nothing but stands out.

The business quadrupled its revenues during Covid as, all around him, companies raced to go online. By the end of May 2021 he had five staff — and was still growing.

That precipitated a move to a new building: first to an office he built at the back of his parents’ house, followed more recently by the purchase and upgrading of premises in Dundalk town, at a total cost of €600,000.

Today the business has a turnover of €1.2 million and 12 full-time staff. As a full-service agency it has clients ranging from holders of local enterprise office trading online vouchers, to multinational clients such as WuXi Biologics, for whom it acts as an outsourced European marketing department.

This year Zoma launched an online food ordering platform, Munchd, that has to date processed more than €1.5 million in sales.

Employee experience is of central importance to Kieran. As an avid footballer and coach he likes to promote workplace wellbeing and fitness. Zoma recently became a front-of-shirt sponsor at Dundalk FC.

The fact that his mother died two years ago and didn’t enjoy good health for some time before that drove home for him the importance of health and wellbeing.

“It shaped my outlook on life,” he says. “I love sport but even just to get out to walk the dog or go for a run is important. Some of the best ideas I ever got came when I was out for a walk or a run and, equally, I just want to make sure that whoever works at Zoma comes in feeling happy and enjoys the work.”