false 2009-01-28T13:54:48-08:00 <p>Sitting here in our current office, large windows letting in light and the phones ringing on our desks, it’s hard to believe that just six years ago we were cramped into a basement, fighting tooth and nail to get our custom water bottle business off the ground. Scott, my cousin, saw an opportunity to harness the power of the Internet to empower customers to order a versatile product on their terms and we jumped at it. Everyone told us it was impossible to ship bottled water, because of the weight, but we had faith that we could make the idea work.</p><p><br /></p><p><br />Pooling all our resources, we commissioned a slick website, bought a label printer and a labeling machine, and set up shop in Scott’s grandmother’s unheated basement. There was no phone line or cell phone reception down there, so to take orders we had to stand outside in the freezing rain using a notepad and a cell phone. Scott’s grandmother also kept a lemon tree down there, so we had to share space with it while running our business.</p><p><br /></p><p><br />At one point, I was huddled over my laptop wearing three sweatshirts and shivering when a lemon hit me in the head and I thought to myself, “I left my six-figure job for this?!â€* </p><p><br /></p><p><br />We had to get creative as our business expanded. The basement wasn’t large enough for the pallets of water we ordered so we rented out a storage space in a nearby city and stored the pallets there. To process orders, we had to print the labels in the basement, drive them up to the storage space, unplug the vending machine so we could plug in our labeler with a 100ft. extension cord, and drive the labeled bottles back to the basement for shipping.</p><p><br /></p><p><br />Our approach was strategic, though, and through a combination of great quality, low prices, and excellent service our business started to speed up. We were eventually able to rent our first actual office and warehouse space, and that gave us the ability to handle even more business.</p><p><br /></p><p><br />We paid attention to other successful websites and emulated the approaches that worked well and pioneered our own approaches when we thought we could do better. With a continuously updated cutting-edge website and a wide variety of offerings, our business was finally doing well enough that we could afford to move to our current location with a warehouse twice the size of our first facility.</p><p><br /></p><p><br />We’re in the process of updating our site yet again, as a matter of fact, and we’re excited about how the new technology will lead to the expansion of our business.</p> c4eGLQpTqqllvkab8P4pmk false true false 2009-04-23T10:37:15-07:00 0 true 1 false true false 1 Out From Under the Lemon Tree 2009-11-07T18:21:50-08:00 dqgysMpTuqllvkab8P4pmk BYBErika 2197 0 dY1Ghod6ZhRBWr3AL8abBw