2003 was a busy year for Amplifier. I think this is the year we started doing business as Amplifier instead of our Delaware Corp name Copernica, Inc. This is also the year that Despair planned to grow its peak-season marketing from mailing 300K mailers to 3 million catalogs – Amplifier was not involved in physically mailing these catalogs, but we did understand that we were going to need to scale our customer service operations and our fulfillment operations to address this order-of-magnitude-level growth.

To accommodate the growth, we started looking for some real warehouse space. With Scott Flack’s and Steve Mattingly’s help, we ended up signing a lease at 800 Interchange Blvd – a few miles east of Guerrero. “Interchange”, our fourth home, started as the middle suite, 102, of the property which had 3 south-facing suites and 3 north-facing suites. Ours was center-south-facing and 30,000 square feet. Interchange was our first proper warehouse in a proper warehouse district. Nothing sexy (unless warehouse decor is your thing).

Joel’s brother, Austin Bush, came on board, and he took over running the operations from me at this point; I was taking care of all of the finance matters. Not so much because I was qualified to do so, but because someone had to do it. This was where the lessons began to take hold that the story on the data side really needed to match the story on the actual operations side. Because we’re paying money and asking for money based on what the data says we did, and it better be what we actually did. And there’s a lot of ways that fiction can take hold in that story.