As a child, Charlene Dupray printed her own business cards on a portable ink jet printer, branding herself a Creative Consultant. Her subsequent real-life jobs included corporate Executive Assistant, Shore Excursion Manager for a cruise line, Bilingual Recruiter for luxury goods companies, and Co-Founder of a chocolate bon bon business, yet those childhood business cards were à propos for each and every role.

In 2009, Charlene founded French Press Marketing and printed cards once again for the role she’d been preparing for all of those years – Marketing Consultant. Since then, she has helped dozens of businesses find their voices, create their brands, and build engaging websites that work.

You’ll find Charlene in Wilmington, NC, where she lives and works in a former grocery store and nightclub now known as “The Pink House”. Her roommates are a very French husband and their two precocious children.

A graduate of The University of Chicago, Charlene is a nerd at heart who loves to geek out over great books, linguistics, fine food, indie films, foreign travel, and flea markets. Currently, her hobbies include reading bedtime stories, cooking organic fish sticks, and dreaming of the evening she can return to Relax & Restore yoga.

Hailing from a big Irish family, Michael Pellington and his brothers all shared an entrepreneurial spirit. Michael joined forces with one brother, owning and operating a thriving art gallery and custom framing business in a downtown metropolitan area. He married in 1990. His beautiful wife of nearly 30 years jokes that Michael made her a “computer widow” just one year later, when he delved deep into the world of computer programming. Michael had found two perfect marriages – his own and that of art and technology (i.e. web design).

When Michael relocated to Wilmington, NC to raise his family, he signed on as an eCommerce Manager for a fine jewelry retailer with over 70 storefronts in 17 different states. Serving the company for nearly a decade, Michael became their Marketing Director, building an in-house agency for everything from catalogs, TV commercials, and billboards to e-commerce and direct mail campaigns. Michael joined forces with French Press Marketing in 2014 where he oversees web development and hosting, SEM marketing, graphic design, and more.

On weekends, you’ll find Michael cooking for family (he’s a wonderful home chef); teaching at church (he’s a devoted student of theology); cheering for the Ohio State Buckeyes; or napping during a PGA Tour event (he’s a die-hard golf fan).

Behind the scenes of French Press Marketing, you’ll find a small group of well-educated, thoughtful freelancers who work with Charlene and Michael on special projects. Recruited and hand-picked by Charlene, these incredibly talented individuals lend their research, writing, design, and administrative talents to French Press Marketing when they aren’t pursuing their careers as poets, novelists, architects, playwrights, comic book authors, Masters and Ph.D. students, or illustrators. As a client, you’ll probably never meet them, but you’ll feel their spirit, energy, and boundless creativity in the work we produce for you.