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What started as one quiet idea is now 30 years of intentional craft.
Gerald Karst Sr. spent his career as a Charleston firefighter and later as a nuclear foreman at the Naval Shipyard. When he retired in '96, he quickly discovered that retirement wasn't quite his thing. Beyond the golf course, he was bored. As a Shriner, tasked with sourcing uniforms that year, and finding local options for embroidery and screen printing, he was a bit underwhelmed and saw the opportunity—he decided to do it himself.
Jump to 2003- Michelle, home from Belmont University, and working in the Nashville music industry took interest in what he was building. She'd been an art & design kid before music pulled her to TN, and she temporarily jumped in to help. Sales was not on the radar, nor was there even an awareness that that's what she was doing. She opened the phone book and started calling to see who she could help. Her first project - water bottles for a gas company owner's kid's hockey team. Random, small, specific, real—prime for learning the ropes.
Then Gerald had a bad accident and stepped back. Suddenly, Michelle was running the day-to-day — solo, and very quickly. She didn't sink—she swam. Easily talked into the golf course and retirement again, he said, "You've got this," and dipped out. She kept what was working — the care, the relationships, the standards — and slowly built around it. Built in a novel, different way. New systems. Better approaches. Bigger clients. None of it fast. All of it deliberate.
Twenty-two years later, Karst is an Inc. Southeast Ranked, WBENC-certified national agency running 60+ brand programs out of North Charleston—with 98% client retention, average client tenure north of 12 years and a reputation for doing things better and bigger. Most of those relationships started small and grew the same way the company did: one great project at a time.
The fundamentals haven't changed. The bar has. Strategy and design do the heavy lifting — and a wow factor is what happens when they're done right. We still pick up the phone and we're still allergic to "tchotchkes".
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