We will take you to our leader.
Our team is led by Jeff Riley, a 15-year veteran of the publishing industry who acquired and managed multimillion-dollar product lines for Pearson Education’s trade and education divisions before he founded Box Twelve.
Jeff’s products outsold the competition in highly competitive markets. His products also won awards. Most importantly, however, Jeff’s products reflected the passion, creativity, and work ethic he poured into each one of them.
Not bad for a kid who once batted last and played right field for his Little League baseball team in Independence, Oregon. Thankfully, he grew up and learned a few things about baseball. And about writing.
His first work was believed to have been a letter to an older sister describing – in painstaking detail, of course – each animal on the family’s farm at Route 1, Box 12. At 14, he was writing for the town paper – delivering free, albeit breath-taking, prose for the Polk County (Ore.) Itemizer-Observer. Who knew there was such devoted readership to middle-school basketball summaries?
At 17, he won the American Society of News Editors & Quill and Scroll 1984 International Writing and Photo Contest, writing the outstanding sports story among high school journalists nationwide. And to think he didn’t even know what a quill and scroll was. The award earned him a shot at a scholarship to the University of Iowa; he was a finalist, but he didn’t earn the free ride. And he has openly rooted against the Hawkeyes since.
Instead, he attended Oregon State University, writing for the Corvallis Gazette-Times as an 18-year-old freshman. As a junior at Oregon State, he was among 35 college students nationwide who were accepted into a summer internship program at the Los Angeles Times.
At 22, he was writing full-time for the Los Angeles Times -- even though he got lost en route to most of the high school football games he was covering.
There’s nothing quite like a few wrong turns in Compton to drive a guy into publishing, and he has been parked there since 1993. He turned in his corporate badge and Hertz Gold Club card in 2007 to start Box 12. Thanks in no small part to the marketing and business development wizardry of his lovely wife, Deborah, Box 12 has quickly become one of the most highly regarded creative solution providers in the industry.
For more information about Jeff, visit his LinkedIn profile.
For more information about Box Twelve, email us at info@boxtwelve.com