BALTIMORE (Map, News) - At the end of a typically busy Friday in which she saw as many as 30 clients, Fanny Chakedis pulled into her driveway and ended a routine phone call with longtime friend and employee Ed Armstrong.

“Well, I’m home,” Armstrong recalls her saying as they hung up on the afternoon of March 28.

Hours later, in the early morning of March 29, Chakedis passed away from heart-related causes at the age of 58. Her death threw into doubt the future of Arista Advertising, the Timonium-based firm she founded in 1987.

But two weeks ago, Armstrong led a group of investors who purchased Arista from Chakedis’ family, pledging to retain the agency’s five employees and 20 clients, which include major business such as McCormick & Co.

“Fanny was more than an employer to us,” said Armstrong, Arista’s new president. “She would have been devastated to think it would just go on the auction block after she passed.”

Armstrong said Arista focuses on long-term partnerships with its clients, a trait Chakedis spoke of in a March 26, 2007, profile in The Examiner.

“Clients have learned that when they try to cut corners and costs, they end up paying for it in the long run,” Chakedis said. “A lot of them are looking for someone they can trust to handle their products and material to make them look good.”

One of those clients is the Washington, D.C.-based trade organization Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association. Armstrong first worked with Chakedis and Arista in 1996 when he worked at the association, and the group remains a client today.

“It was just Fanny, she was so, so good,” said Dolores Alonso, the association’s director of membership. “It’s the chemical industry, it’s dry — how hard is that to make interesting? — but she did it.”

Armstrong said the agency has moved forward with new projects, though clients at first weren’t sure how soon the company would return to work.

“We received a few e-mails two weeks later asking gingerly, ‘Is it OK if I ask you to do something?’ and we said of course,” Armstrong said. “We’re still open for business.”

acahall@baltimoreexaminer.com