eCommerce Highlight Of The Week: Kustom Koozies
Who doesn’t love a good success story? We’ve decided to post an EPIC success story every week, highlighting the trials, tribulations, and eCommerce success’ achieved by hard-working individuals like yourselves. This week we’ll share the start-up story from Kustom Koozies, an eCommerce Biz that makes insulated beverage coolers with super cool screen-printed designs. They started out small and now take care of about 6,000 weddings every year among other things. They’re kind of awesome.
Our company was started over 13 years ago, in 1998, when we were looking to order insulated beverage coolers for our boat. The minimum order was 200!! We didn’t need 200, we needed a dozen. We called and emailed and visited print facilities to try and find a company that would do low quantities. We had no luck at all. We are not the types to give up, so we went on a search to figure out how we could do it ourselves economically. It took us 2 years and we burnt/used 100’s of blanks, but finally figured it out. We ended up combining two processes that no-one else (apparently had ever thought of). Well, we were able to print in small quantities, so we started doing it in the spare bedroom of our house. Our friends ordered, and liked us, then their friends ordered and liked us, pretty soon we were doing a good bit of business. It is so exciting. Fast Forward to 13 years later, and we have a 5,000 square foot facility and we handle 100’s of orders every week. We feel so fortunate to be in this business. Our customers are great fun, and we feel like we are a part of their event. We have made great friends over the years, and been part of class reunions, weddings, birthday parties, and almost every other kind of trip/party/event you could think of. It is a blast to travel the country and see our product in use and on shelves in businesses.
Everyday our team happily works to get our products to our clients. Our years of experience are at their disposal. We often make suggestions to our customers to improve our product to make their KOOZIE® Can Cooler perfect (our most common suggestion? Switch to white ink, white ink shows up very, very well.) We will of course, do any color that our clients want. We are constantly working to improve our processes and our website to make Kustom Koozies easier for our clients and a more pleasant experience. Ordering from Kustom Koozies should be the easiest and most fun part of our client’s experience.
Our main niche is weddings. We provide wedding favors for couples all over the country. We are fortunate to be a part of about 6,000 weddings every year. Our marketing is based on great reviews on wedding sites, search engines, and keeping active on Social Media. Our company challenges have been managing a growing company, hiring the right employees, and keeping up-to-date in social media.
Our two small children come into our shop a few days of the week, and help out where they can. They are quite knowledgeable in our processes. They can take a job from start to finish. Our oldest actually take orders at school from friends that they can come in and print themselves. We enjoy great relationships with our customers as most of their orders are associated with fun events so we get to hear their stories, and they share pictures with us. It’s really a lot of fun and we enjoy it more and more everyday.
About The Author:
Robert Liddle, President of Kustom Koozies, graduated from East Carolina University. He’s Married to Julie Liddle with two children. They currently reside in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Website: http://www.kustomkoozies.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kustom-Koozies/293312867365701
Twitter: https://twitter.com/koozies
https://plus.google.com/+KustomkooziesLLC/posts
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