At Simply Stamps, we are so thankful that in a world where so many small businesses fail, we are one of the success stories. Our story actually begins in 1954 as a small rubber stamp shop in the heart of Jacksonville, Florida, but was brought nationwide online in 2002.
Our owner and CEO, Bryan Croft, was “just playing around on the Internet” taking a gamble that the whole dot com thing might take off when he launched SimplyStamps.com. (Really, he was just trying to impress a girl…now his wife!) 16 years later, it’s a multi-multi-million-dollar site that fuels dozens of jobs and services tens of thousands of customers annually.
Throughout the last 16 years, we’ve taken on many different identities, as brands often do as they try to find their voice. (Just look at all the different looks of Coca-Cola over the years!) Though we aren’t Coke, we, too have had several logo changes and color theme changes.
We invested countless hours in developing and adding new products to offer our customers, starting out with just a handful when we launched the site to now offering more than 3,500, many of those with multiple options so the catalog is even greater. We placed a lot of emphasis in becoming a stamp site with the largest selection anywhere; a stamp site that offers every type of stamp – for business or for personal use – there is to offer. This took time. And it was all part of the journey.
Perhaps the most significant change of all though, has not just been in logos, colors, and products but in our technology. My, my, how things have changed! Looking back at the site when we first launched, it’s clear that e-commerce was just at it’s infancy.
Over the years, we adapted more options and features for our customers as they became available. The site became faster, load times became less and less, and checkout became easier. You can clearly see the evolution of our site design when you take a look back.
Safe to say that the evolution of our web technology is the most instrumental chapter to our story. For those not familiar with e-commerce, you may ask why this is important, and why we are taking the time to write a blog post and share this with you. Well, a few weeks ago, right before Christmas, we took the leap that was both necessary and petrifying.
On December 20th, we migrated our old web platform to a new web platform which to you as our reader or customer might not mean much other than the site looks a bit different today than it did a few weeks ago. But to us internally, and for those that really know e-commerce business, this project was over a year in the making and vital to our future growth. Necessary. Simply Stamps.com itself supports probably half of our nearly 100-employee company and to mess the change up would be a catastrophe. Petrifying.
We did it though, because we will be able to offer our customers even greater selection, speed, options, checkout speed, and so much more – it’s just the next step in our evolution of our Simply Stamps journey. The hard work of so many people on our team may seem to have gone unnoticed with the holiday rush and time-off, but the Company is grateful to each and every team member who made the migration possible.
To our (newish) Director of Tech who lead this up and whipped the project into shape with much needed management, to the talented designer who provided all the images (and alternate images for each product), to the Business Analyst that probably spent over 10,000 hours on the project, to the SEO Manager who had the weight of the world on her shoulders, to the Director of Online Sales and Marketing who was ultimately responsible for just about everything, to the Graphic Designer who created the new site visuals and design, to the Distribution Team who worked tirelessly on the minutia that only they could withstand, to our Programmers, to our Customer Focus Team of dozens that checked the site, rechecked the site and then did it all again, to the CFT member who spent hours on perfecting search terms, to those in other departments that provided valuable input — we cannot say it enough how thankful we are for all the hard work.
The journey of any 16-year old company and its success can only be attributed to those who build it. What will the next 16 years or more hold? We hope you will stay with us to find out what more is on our journey.
2 Comments to "Saying Thanks: The Story of our 16 Year-Long Journey Online"
Bryan, What you & all your team members have accomplished is so very impressive. I wish you the best of luck and
success for years to come.
Thank you for the kind words, Janet! It would not have been possible without the support of people like you. Wishing the best for you as well!