Thinking...

History

4Ward was founded in 2005 as a partnership between Ariton Zanev and Andrija Gramatikovski. It started off as a small company with no corporative-venture-investment capital, just a lot of enthusiasm and a dream to change the way business is done.

Led by the idea of joining great design with technology, we started developing our two teams – graphic design and DTP, and software engineering. We started by developing simple web sites serving as home-pages, and providing DTP services for few Macedonian clients. Our work proved to be very successful, and not much longer, we started taking up bigger projects for both local and international clients.

4Ward became established in the Macedonian market as a respected partner of big private companies, non-governmental organizations and some Government institutions. We have also had the opportunity to proove our worth on a few international marketing campaigns, and we won a number of tenders for EU-funded projects. We continue to change the way business is done and challenge ourselves daily.

We never forget to nurture our team and grow a culture of colaborative creativity. We also make sure that we never ever run out of coffee in our small kitchen, keep our monitors calibrated and the rack temperature bellow 25ºC.

2010

It’s alive

This year was all about entrepreneurship and investors. We worked on an idea for 2 years – to create an eco-system for online advertising which would support all the different processes involved in this huge industry. So we created a monster and named it Mnogoo . Mnogoo is a huge online system for publishing content, serving ads, building user profiles, paying online with credit cards… It took us more than 9 months to pull this off and to learn that you still need to do some pre-planning even if you use SCRUM project management.

Anyway we were generously supported by an investor and launched this project as an independent company where we are now proud partners and creative and technological supporters.

2009

Eazyio in da house!

We launched our first product – Eazyio (stands for: Easy Input Output) a complete WCMS (Web Content Management System). We use the Eazyio framework for all our web projects.

Having in mind the maturity level we have achieved as a company we decided it is time to change the tune and present ourselves a bit differently. We dressed up and changed our brand image and stopped humming this iconic children song.

2008

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In 2008 we won our first big international client – Perfetti Van Melle and we began developing a system of 24 brand sites for Chupa Chups and Mentos for the CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) region. We also learnt the secret behind the Mentos vs. Cola drinks... We presented the system in Prague to around 50 representatives of PVM in the whole CEE region… A blast!

This year we also made another really important step for our team. We passed the magic number 10!

2007

Who are these kids!?

In the past two years we gained a lot of experience. 4Ward grew as a company and we along with it. We got new clients and new challenges.

In 2007 we developed a web-based voucher distribution system which helped the Government distribute 12.000 computer aid vouchers to college students in their final year of studies. We designed the special edition cover page of The Economist again and our print ads for the Invest in Macedonia campaign were published in newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, Daily Telegraph, Die Presse, Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune…

We will remember 2007 by our brand new office with completely new equipment, which was symbolically or not one story higher than the old one. We installed some 3km of cables and bought our first 42U rack, couple of servers and a NAS to keep our precious work safe.

2006

Are all beginnings so difficult?

Yes, and we confirmed this, but we also confirmed that hard work pays off in the end. In our second year we began working on several bigger projects. We worked on the “Invest in Macedonia”” campaign, we organized a promotion for the new Mercedes Benz C-Class and we launched our first web based application for the Business Start-Up Center.

We had an amazing opportunity to design a cover page for a special edition of The Economist issued for the Invest in Macedonia campaign. And yes we expanded our office. Double the space, triple the work…

2005

How to get in shape? Try by registering a company!

We will remember 4Ward’s registration by the mileage we made running between institutions. We went through this process while the government was hanging the procedure and the desk clerks were as confused as we were. In this whole mess we didn’t know when the company was registered and we somehow adopted October 17 to be 4Ward’s birthday.

We will remember 2005 as a year filled with beautiful beginnings. We bought our first computer, we made our first flash website for the Coca Cola Sound Wave festival and we moved in our 14m2 office. Step by step we began building our small family with great ambitions.