Happy 10 Year Anniversary to Us!

Business opportunities arise when you can identify a need that is not being met by the marketplace. For us that opportunity came into focus in 2010 as we became familiar with specialty coffee roasters. There seemed to be quite a few that complained of long lead times for printed bags from China or the unprofessional look of a bag with a printed label. Was there anything we could do with our digital label printing equipment to address this issue? There was no boxed solution we could purchase to attack the problem. We needed to be pioneering and figure out a solution. Fortunately, we had some people who could do that. We began fooling around printing packaging film on an Indigo 4500 and built an inline laminator. We also purchased ‘The Ohlson’ to make bags – a nightmarish piece of equipment that we used to get the idea off the ground. On the sales & marketing side of things we poured our efforts into our website and being able to sell our custom printed bags through an online process. Our first site was simple and effective. It sold one thing and one thing only…a digitally printed 12oz side gusset coffee bag. We crossed our fingers and launched the company at the San Diego Coffee Fest in June of 2011. The result? We won best new product at the show within days of launching and without having a single customer! Quite the pioneering effort!

The following days, months and years had us shifting our focus from designing the concept of the company to actually running the company. In addition to being pioneering we picked up two other key ingredients in our journey.

From our start, we were a little different from the competition and we often heard many compliments about our business model. Customers liked that they could place their orders online. They liked that they could get their bags quickly. They liked that they could order small quantities. Last but not least, they said they loved the attention our customer service team paid to them. A message emerged. Our customers liked doing business with us because we were easy to do business with. Along the way we have identified things to measure and have focused on getting better. This focus has served us well and has pushed us to be a better company.

So there you have it! We learned to be easy, focused and pioneering to get to where we are today. Thanks to all of our loyal customers that have stuck by our side through this adventure.

We’ll continue to stick to our values to see where the next 10 years will take us. Let’s make big things happen!

- Will