Prominent Portland Agency Tenfour Shuttering on February 1

“We just couldn’t get enough business, really,” said creative director Mark McCarthy.

In 2012, Tenfour was named Social Media Agency of the Year by the national Social Media Awards, alongside Seattle-based Waggener Edstrom. At those awards, the company also received a prize for best money-making campaign, for its Hawaiian Airlines “Send-a-friend” campaign.

The company’s former and current clients include Nike, Microsoft, Toshiba, Sony, Cisco and Dell.

“It's a surprise," says David Burn, editor of the Portland-based AdPulp advertising blog. “Because they’d been on such a roll getting new business. One can only speculate. It was a cash flow issue, probably.”

Under the name Planned Marketing Solutions International (PMSI), the company had maintained a design and logo business in the southwest Portland neighborhood of Johns Landing since 1979. In 2010, the company rebranded itself as Tenfour, and moved into a large Pearl District office at 910 NW Hoyt St., changing its purview to the more tech-focused world of digital and social media marketing.

The company was known to some outside the advertising industry for its First Thursday parties at the company's headquarters. As recently as September 2012, the company had still been expanding its staff.

"It saddens me,” says Burn. “You don’t want to see Portland lose an agency that’s emerging like that.”