Lucky is the art major who can turn her creative passion into a successful career, and lucky is the city that can keep its emerging talent local. Richmond lucked out big time when VCU grads Wendy LaMaskin and Stacy Murphy Johnson decided to build their professional lives here, putting their creative skills to use promoting businesses and foundations locally and beyond.

For Wendy, who graduated from VCU’s Communication Art and Design program in 1990, the decision to go into advertising was an easy one. When asked how she became interested in the field, she says, “I have my sister to thank for introducing me to the advertising world. She worked up at an ad agency in Alexandria, Williams Whittle…. I was always into art and design, so I interned there every summer and every school break and really enjoyed it. It was fun seeing things go from start to finish and seeing it all come together.”

Her sister was actually the reason Wendy came to Virginia. When big sis moved to the Commonwealth, Wendy was a senior in high school in Des Moines, Iowa. Shortly after, she and her mom decided it would be a fun change of pace to move to NoVA as well and “see what the East Coast had to offer.”

As it turns out, it had a lot to offer Wendy and her budding interest in art and advertising. A lover of animals, Wendy always wanted to be a vet, but she shied from the idea of putting animals down. At Williams Whittle, she saw a chance to turn her tendency to doodle into a vocation. Others saw her talent as well; while Wendy was at VCU a friend recommended her to Richmond ad agency Barber Martin, and they hired her as a graphic designer before she’d even graduated college.

Now, 18 years later, Wendy has been a key player at Barber Martin for most of its 21-year history. When she started, she was one of just seven employees, but the company has grown over the years to a team of 27 people, all working together to improve their clients’ sales and public image. Barber Martin’s focus is retail and its slogan is “Sales over night, image over time,” which means it strives to increase a client’s sales quickly, but with a long-term focus on bolstering or even reinventing the way consumers perceive the brand.

To achieve this means a lot of hard work and innovation on the part of Barber Martin’s team, and now that she’s risen to associate creative director, Wendy gets to ply her skills from stage one of a project through to its completion. Sometimes this is a surprisingly quick process. “With technology improving over the years, clients expect everything very quickly so we do a lot of quick turnarounds, and that’s what makes everything so crazy,” Wendy explains. “I’ve had clients tell me, ‘I need an ad in 30 minutes.” And Wendy’s response? “O.K.!”

The rise of technology also means increased opportunities for advertising, and part of Wendy’s job is encouraging her clients to take advantage of new media outlets like company web sites, Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about their brand, product, or message. That said, a lot of her projects are still of the tried-and-true print and TV commercial variety. For the latter, which is a more time-consuming process, the first step is a brainstorming session. “What usually happens is we’ll get a job, and we’ll concept it from start to finish based upon the strategy we’ve developed and collaborated with the client on. Then we talk to production about getting our ideas on paper put into action in a TV commercial.”

That’s where Stacy Murphy Johnson comes in. Stacy works downtown at a production and post-production agency called Park Group. As executive producer, she coordinates with directors from all over Virginia and the country to produce commercials for advertising clients like Barber Martin. Stacy has worked with Wendy in this capacity ever since joining Park Group 11 years ago, and the two have become friends. When someone like Wendy brings a script or a storyboard to Stacy, she gets to work recommending the best director for the job and arranging a top-notch freelance production crew to carry out the project.

Just as Wendy’s sister inspired her interest in advertising, Stacy attributes her desire to produce films to her mother, who worked in production when Stacy was growing up. Because of her, Stacy started working as a production assistant at a young age. In those days, Stacy says, “I would do anything, I would work for free, I didn’t care. That’s what you have to do to get your foot in the door.”

In spite of this early start, it wasn’t always clear what route Stacy’s film career would take. When she left her hometown of Portsmouth to attend VCU, she studied fashion design: “I thought I wanted to do costume design for movies because I started production when I was a teenager and knew I wanted to be in movies.” Her plans changed when she realized she doesn’t really like to sew. Says Stacy, “I actually made hats with a friend for Nordstrom, but after basically running a sweatshop in our living room I decided, ‘This is for the birds! I’m getting back into production.’”

After working freelance for a few years, Stacy got her foot in the door of Park Group, and has been there ever since. When she started as production coordinator, she was already producing short spots, and now that she’s an executive producer and vice president, she’s producing what she wryly calls, “Larger, more logistical nightmare shoots.” These days, the tables have turned and Stacy actually hires her mother, who’s now a stylist, to do make-up, hair and wardrobe for some of her commercials.

When asked why she chose to produce commercials over the longer documentaries and movies she worked on in her freelancing days, Stacy explains, “I actually prefer doing commercials because they’re shorter and you work like crazy for a few weeks on them. You shoot for a day or five days and then it’s over, as opposed to longer projects where you shoot for weeks and weeks. I prefer to jump into the fire, and then it’s done!”

Staying calm in the middle of that fire is essential to her job performance, Stacy says. “I think what makes me good at what I do is that I’m a pretty laid back person…. I’m not a freaker at all. I think in our job people can tend to think problems are emergencies…. There are times when you look around and think, ‘Everything that could go wrong is going wrong,’ but somehow it works out. Just knowing that it all worked out and you did your best and the client’s coming back is the best part.”

Keeping the client happy is the most important part of the job for both Stacy and Wendy, and they’ve succeeded, working together over the years to create commercials for clients ranging from Cato Fashions to the Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation.

When these women aren’t working, they’re nabbing precious time with family. For Wendy, that’s her husband of 11 years and their six rescued miniature pinschers. For Stacy, it’s her husband of almost 10 years and their son and daughter, ages six and three. Both women cite the long hours as the biggest demand their jobs place on them. Says Wendy, “It takes a lot of time, but I always say you have to do what it takes to make the business grow and to make yourself grow as a person.”

And that’s what these two do, day in and day out, as they push the creative envelope to come up with and facilitate fresh and innovative ways to get the word out on their clients’ behalf. “It’s a wild business,” admits Stacy, “but it’s great fun. I can’t imagine doing anything else!”