A whole lot has changed since that frigid Monday in February when we worked our first day from our warehouse. We survived not paying ourselves, we’ve grown our sites by leaps and bounds, we’ve made significant improvements to all of our business processes from accounting to shipping, and we’ve seen revenue grow to more than double what it was in 2007.
But one of the best ways to see progress is to walk through our warehouse. Everyday I walk out on the floor I’m amazed at how much we have progressed in just nine short months. Take a glance at the photos on that post and then come back and look at these. Today was the first time I looked at those photos in a long time. The place was even emptier than I remember!
Earlier this week I decided to take a break from real work and take some pictures so that I could take all of you on a photo tour of our warehouse. I apologize for the darkness of the pics – the lighting obviously isn’t so great. Some of the photos have the same “spots” on them that the ones from February did. Different camera, so I’d assume it’s something to do with the lighting? Any photo experts want to weigh in?
Anyway, let’s get started.
When you first walk in the door, you’re in our tiny little office. It’s just enough room for five small tables. We only work from this room in the winter, when we keep the warehouse temperature at 55 degrees and the office at 67 degrees.
From the office, you can walk out on to the warehouse floor. The first thing you see is our much more spacious work area where we spend the warmer months.
Turn to the right, and you’ll find our loading dock/hockey goal, with our kitchen in the corner (which you really can’t see very well other than the side of the fridge).
Upon closer inspection, you’ll notice our target. That’s a picture taken from Hot Chicks with Douchebags representing a former vendor who was a total douchebag to us. We’ve never met him, but we can only imagine that’s what he looks like…
Turn around 180 degrees and you can see the rest of our warehouse floor.
On the right you’ll see our biodegradable packing peanut bags. We made the switch about a month ago. George struck a killer deal with the manufacturer so we stocked up. In the down months of January and February we’ll be doing a campaign to show how we’ve “gone green” with our packing materials, paper, etc. Don’t you just want to jump on top of them? I’m soooo tempted every day.
We’ve gone from having one and a half rows of shelving units, to having four full rows and two rows of boxed items (not to mention a row along the wall).
On the left is our new packing area, which I will delve a bit more into in my next post. Behind the packing area is the garage door where FedEx picks up our packages every day.
Behind the packing area is our really tiny shipping computer room.
And finally, a turn to the right and you’ll find our array of different boxes, ordered by size so they’re easy to find.
You also may notice how clean our floors are. We rented one of those floor zamboni’s and gave it a good cleaning last month. It’s amazing how much less dust there is now.
That’s my tour. Hopefully the next tour nine months from now will show just as much improvement!
It does look like you’ve come on a lot- you should be so proud!
Also, I think the spots are probably dust in the air reflecting light back from the flash.
Thanks Rob. Good call on the dust – one of my partners suggested the same thing so that’s probably it. It’s crazy to me to think that there’s THAT much dust, but I suppose that’s what you get in a warehouse…even if we do zamboni our floors
Awesome!
1.) The packing peanuts look like they could be part of some sort of “Jackass” style stunt. Ex: Concrete floors + car wax = giant slip and slide.
2.) We should throw a HouseOfRave.com sponsored rave in the warehouse
3.) When looking at your warehouse shelves “Wax on, wax off” comes to mind.
4.) Congrats on the growth!
Haha thanks Nev. I’m up for the rave…just not until the spring when it gets a little warmer in there. It’s soooo cold in there now.
Congratulations, Adam! Everything looks great.
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