Category: Amplifier
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Origin Story – 26
ok – at around the same time the Livestrong wristbands were about to become a thing, we were in Plano visiting Morgan’s family. Morgan, her dad, and I went over to Arbor Hills Nature Preserve, and on a whim I tried to cross the monkey bars at the playground there. To my dismay, I could…
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Origin Story – 25
Amplifier scaled up in 2003 to accommodate Despair’s large catalog drop, but 2004 and the LAF/Livestrong wristband work demanded a state change of an altogether different sort. It was high profile work for a high profile client. Athletes were wearing wristbands in the Olympics, candidates were wearing the wristbands in the presidential election, and celebrities…
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Origin Story – 24
Despair’s planned, big catalog drop in Q4 2003 prompted our move to Interchange, a proper warehouse, during the summer of 2003. We still had some years left on our lease at Guerrero, but we needed the larger warehouse space for our operations. And the new space served us well that peak season. Fulfillment and customer…
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Origin Story – 23
Somehow Sam Koski smuggled wisdom into my high school head in a way that has shaped my thinking ever since. I think he teaches at Doral Academy now, but, back in the day, he made the math and computer departments at Miami Springs Senior High elite. I can’t overstate his excellence. There were so many…
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Origin Story – 22
We toured Calendar Club over off Burleson and Montopolis in anticipation of moving into Interchange. Calendar Club was optimized for fulfilling calendars, and we were expecting a huge season of shipping calendars in response to Despair’s big catalog mailing. As I mentioned before, we met Steve Terry on this tour as well as Alan Katzberg.…
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Origin Story – 21
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…
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Origin Story – 20
Credit card processing was a significant barrier to entry for small brands wanting to get started online in the early 2000s. In turn, it was a barrier to our growth as an e-commerce fulfillment provider in the small business space. Paypal was just getting started, Stripe wouldn’t be around for a while yet, and the…
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Origin Story – 19
We got an early lesson in the traps of units of measure. Units of measure are the dimensional characteristics of an item – length, width, height, weight, Pallet/Case/Inner Pack/Each, conversion qty (how many Eaches per unit), etc. I don’t remember how M.O.M. handled Units of Measure – I know that we didn’t handle them all that well. As…
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Origin Story – 18
There’s chipboard and there’s corrugate. Corrugate is fluted and multi-layered. Chipboard is single-ply and dense – what’s used on a toothbase carton or cereal box. We would insert a corrugate pad into the calendar prior to shrink wrapping it. This would give the calendar the backbone it needed to keep its shape when the shrink…
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Origin Story – 17
Most of our shipments in those days were calendar shipments. Accordingly, we added shrink wrapping to our set of make-ready services. We bought a red shrink wrap machine and worked on figuring out how to use it. There were a handful of variables to consider when setting up your shrink wrap machine: 1. weight of…
Analogistical 