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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Warehouse
Now With a “Real” Office
Back in ’09 I wrote The Bootstrapped Office. At that time we had the simplest, most basic work spaces at our warehouse and at home. As should be the case, there were a million things more important than the aesthetics of our office: Thing is, our customers will never see our work area. So when things go good for us we invest in better technology, employees, new product lines, new marketing initiatives, and a little bit in ourselves. Those things matter in our business. The aesthetics of a work area don’t. That was 100% true back then. The office was … Continue reading
Warehouse Heating Problem Solved…3+ Years Later
When we first moved in to our warehouse back in February of 2008 we were less than thrilled with the heating situation. Don’t get me wrong – the place was the perfect size for the perfect price, and to be honest the low cost of operating it is probably one of our biggest assets…but the heating situation still sucked. There were two oil heating units, one for the office and one for the warehouse, both of which looked like they were no less than fifty years old. The place hadn’t had an occupant in over five years, so the oil … Continue reading
Pure Adapt in 2011
I realize that this post is a few weeks late, but I wanted to make sure I took a quick look back at our 2010 and a look forward to 2011, which is already off to an adventurous start. 2010 Review I’m really amazed by what we accomplish every year. At times it seems like things are moving slow, but when I take a look back I can’t say I’m disappointed in the least. Some of the highlights: We started the year by closing Tastefully Driven, our Amazon store, and stopped shipping internationally We launched the Ask a Professional Detailer … Continue reading
Another Record-Breaking Cyber Monday for Detailed Image
Today we completed another killer end to November. Much like in previous years (2009, 2008), we really nailed the prime Holiday shopping period that now stretches from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. We surpassed last year’s revenue for that stretch and we had our largest single day in company history yesterday on Cyber Monday. This month also broke our company record for revenue in a month, and early this month we set our company record for revenue in a year. All of that is even more impressive when you consider that in January we closed Tastefully Driven, stopped … Continue reading
Our Improved Inventory Zone System
A little over a year ago I wrote a post entitled New Warehouse Layout, Inventory Zones, & Efficiency where I explained our new “inventory zone” system. Prior to implementing that system, packing slips would just print out items in alphabetical order, potentially sending one of us all over the warehouse to pull the products for an order. We smartened up and assigned a “zone” to each shelving unit, which was then entered into our database to correspond with the products in the “zone” so that the packing slips printed products in “snaking zone order” like so: This helped pulling speed … Continue reading
Our Warehouse – Updated Pics, Order Packing, and the Future
Our growth feels so slow and steady sometimes that I forget that we’ve actually grown a ton in a short amount of time. The visual representation of this is our warehouse. Updated Pics This is what our product selection looked like just after we moved in on 2/25/2008: Pretty bare. Like an empty cave. Compare that to yesterday: Inside the little room there’s our shipping computer, laser printer, label printer (courtesy of FedEx), and printer/scanner/copier/fax that we bought because we have to send so many faxes to our vendors (eh): Order Packing Not much has changed since November of 2008 … Continue reading
You Don’t See This…Ever
Our neighbors in our industrial park are Ruan Transportation, a large trucking company. We share part of a really big building. As we pulled into the parking lot on Monday morning, we saw this: That’s insane. I’ve never seen anything like it. Normally they just have a handful of relatively new, clean trucks sitting outside. After a quick Google News search, we may have linked it to this accident on January 26 on I-40 in Tennessee. If so, I’m happy to hear that everyone survived…but also mystified at HOW everyone survived…
Thank You DI Customers!
It’s 4:13 PM on Tuesday and I think this is the first second that I’ve had to relax since last Wednesday. The past five days have been out of control busy. When posted on Thursday I was excited to find out what was to come of our Thanksgiving-Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday sale, but I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Even with all of the preparation and all of the things we’ve improved upon in the last year (namely the new Detailed Image site, which has only been around some six months even though it seems like we’ve had in place forever), the … Continue reading
Warehouse Hockey & Company Culture
Last year I wrote about how we use our shipping dock as a hockey goal. For a while it was fun to just blast shots at the goal. Then it was fun to try to score a goal from real far away. Then it was fun to put up targets with pictures of our least favorite vendors. But alas, all of that grew old. So Greg and I set out to make up a new game to entertain us when we didn’t feel like working. After months of experimentation I think we’ve found it. On the back side of our … Continue reading
The Bootstrapped Office
My favorite Lifehacker posts are their “featured workspaces.” If you haven’t seen it, people submit their unique work areas and they pick the best of the best to display on the blog. The ones they pick are usually some combination of simplicity, elegance, creativity, and affordability. If you have a few minutes, take a look at all of the recently featured workspaces. Being that we’re a bootstrapped company, our work areas are more focused on simplicity and affordability and not so much elegance and creativity. It’s all about setting up areas that get the job done. We need to be … Continue reading