Update: How We Are Expanding Our $12M/Year Full E-Commerce Digital Printing Company
This is a follow up story for Sttark. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I’m Dan Frist, and I own Sttark, formerly Frontier Label. Since our last Starter Story, we have changed our company name to Sttark and introduced new services for our customers.
We are a full e-commerce digital printing company in Greenville, SC. As Frontier Label, we solely produced custom labels for nearly 20 years. We have expanded our e-commerce business to include custom folding cartons and graphic design services for packaging.
With Sttark Custom Cartons, we offer businesses a printing solution to create high-quality, full-color custom folding cartons. We started with paperboard materials White Paper, Metallic Plastic, and Black Vellum. Customers can enter their box dimensions into our free dieline template generator to meet their unique needs quickly.
We launched Sttark Graphic Design in response to our customers asking for packaging design help. Before, we required print-ready artwork and did not offer any design services. Whether businesses need quick edits to their current packaging design or want to create a new product entirely, our online ordering platform makes it easier for customers to place their design orders.
Our customers are budding entrepreneurs needing soap packaging or starting a candle business out of their homes to large, private-label cosmetics companies distributing thousands of products monthly. Our customers sell products at local markets and operate large companies with multiple locations around the nation. We provide business solutions for anyone who needs custom-printed packaging.
Over the past year, Sttark has made significant strides toward growth and expansion. We upfitted a new building to launch our cartons business and hired 34 new employees across the company. This increase in our team represents a 17.4% growth rate in our workforce since January 2022. We remain dedicated to providing more services for our customers and plan to explore new avenues for growth and innovation in the coming years.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
In the last year, we have expanded into two new business units, widening our customer base, adding machinery, and growing our employee base. With these additions to our business, we have succeeded in maturity overall. We’re handling a lot more.
Launching new businesses has introduced us to new problems and growing pains we hadn’t encountered before. Supply chain issues have been a part of our problems over the last year, leading to our growth.
Growing our ability to deal with things outside our control is a part of the supply and machinery business. If we can successfully overcome these issues, we will be a stronger company. We have expanded our supply chain network to provide our customers with their desired product options.
As a business owner, I’ve learned the importance of mindful meditation and taking time to think. This is a personal habit that is good for all business owners to have.
All of our efforts have been driven by our desire to make customers’ order experiences more streamlined. We’ve improved our processes and offered our customers options they did not have before, like variable roll quantities. Customers can choose more options on the front end instead of using order comments or account notes.
We’ve expanded into another part of the building for our folding cartons business, adding new machinery and employees. We’ve added inkjet technology to our company that we didn’t use before, and our run lengths have grown significantly over the past year.
We have explored a couple of new marketing channels during this time. We’re using email marketing a little more than we did in the past. I don’t think we’d ever used email marketing that much with any consistency before last year. We’re still learning how to utilize it to promote our new folding cartons product and packaging design services to existing customers, as well as gather feedback from customers on how we can serve them better.
We also tried an industry trade show, but I don’t think it was too successful for us, at least not measurable success. We’ve done trade shows in the past and had similar results, where we couldn’t see that it was helping our business, but we were happy to give it another shot. I think where we might have gone wrong this time around was the fact that the target attendance was different than we anticipated.
So, we learned that choosing industry trade shows that are right for your business has much to do with who’s attending and understanding that demographic well. If your attendees aren’t exactly who you want to sell to, it’s probably not worth your time.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
Most of our challenges have been in Production, and quality control is the big overall category. Things like color consistency, deep die cuts, or slitting errors have been challenging for our team. Daily we’re trying to understand why these errors are happening more often now than before, and it’s probably because we have a lot of new employees in Production.
We’ve had some turnover but mainly growth. When we opened folding cartons, we moved some of our more experienced operators down there to do that, which caused some turnover in our labels production.
I think those are closely related. New operators and increased demand, especially before the holidays and even now, strain the system, leading to quality issues. If we weren’t trying to do so much, then we might not have as much of a challenge with quality control.
But, I think quality control and productivity can be enemies often. I relate this to the military adage “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” used, which applies. This means that you can perform tasks more efficiently by going more slowly to be deliberate in your actions. In efforts to move too quickly, you can sometimes slow the operation overall. We’re struggling to get there, but if we can fix our quality control issues, we’ll be more productive.
That will translate to happier customers, which is what we always want to do. It’s the center of everything we do. Surprisingly, a lot of times, when you’re trying to grow a business, you’re searching for demand. But in our case, we’ve had plenty of business over the past few years, but the struggle has been producing and maintaining quality while making at the demand level.
One thing we’ve relied on in the past was the heroes carrying us, but as we grow as a company, we can’t depend on heroes as much. We need to have good processes in place that can weather the storm, so to speak. You can’t rely on one person to work all night and get you out of a situation or come in on the weekend to fix a machine.
You have to have redundancy and processes in place to handle things. Even my involvement has been greater than it can be because it’s not sustainable. So, specific changes need to happen in the next few years for us to continue growing at the rate we are and still be successful.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
It’s very, very difficult to scale manufacturing quickly. I think it’s easier to scale intellectual work or front office-type processes. The physical process requiring skilled operators using sensitive, highly advanced machines is difficult to scale up quickly.
As a business owner, I’ve learned the importance of mindful meditation and taking time to think. This is a personal habit that is good for all business owners to have. Making time to reflect and prepare for company leadership meetings is also essential because it’s easy to stay in the weeds solving problems without thinking about them at a higher level.
Reflection gives you time to think about the root problem that can span multiple situations instead of only focusing on solving this one specific problem.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year and the next five years?
In 2023, we are working on launching a beta version of Sttark Marketplace for custom-printed packaging to create one source for buyers to go to and be able to select the producer that best fits their needs and desires. The marketplace will launch with labels and cartons producers.
The ability to compare prices and delivery times before making purchasing decisions will allow businesses to find the best packaging solutions to fit their needs faster and more efficiently. I had the idea to create a marketplace in 2008, inspired by more significant online marketplaces that were beginning to pop up around that time, like Google Flights and Amazon.
In addition, we plan to grow the other two businesses, Sttark Custom Cartons and Sttark Graphic Design. This will require equipment, research and development, and process establishment to grow folding cartons as a new business and custom labels as a mature business.
For graphic design, we’ll focus on our target customers, and we’d like more of our broad base of label suppliers to order packaging design services with us. Although it may not be their standard process, I believe we can also be a resource for those customers.
Our cause at Sttark is to be a means to generous giving and evangelical generosity to grow the church. We want to grow the business to be more significant, and the way to do that is to continue to obsess over our customer’s needs in the custom printed packaging market.
Our mission is to be a magnetic company that is the most satisfying solution to the need for custom-printed packaging. Our strategy for doing this is growing these four businesses and possibly more to come in the future.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
Two of the best books I’ve read were Platform Revolution by Geoffrey G. Parker and Scaling Up Excellence by Robert I. Sutton and Hugh Rao. Although these books haven’t been able to perfectly tell me how to navigate our growth over the past year, both are practical and conceptual for business owners.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their businesses?
The reality is that it’s going to be complicated. Don’t be surprised if it isn’t easy. One of the common mistakes I’ve seen with other businesses is being too internally focused. They try to push what they want on their customers rather than obsessing over what the customers want and figuring out how to provide it to them.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We currently don’t have any open positions, but people can visit our Careers page to view and find new opportunities as they become available. We’re not simply hiring someone to do a task when we hire. We look for the “who” over the “what”. We’re constantly asking how we can build a better team.
We ask potential candidates some pre-application questions.
- Are they willing to share a link to their social media?
- What has been the most challenging problem in their career?
- In their opinion, what are the top three factors they attribute to their success?
- Do they believe open debate is helpful or harmful, and why?
Someone who genuinely and thoroughly answers the questions is rare. Potential applicants who skim over these questions are seldom allowed to interview.
Where can we go to learn more?
Website
Contact Email
Social Media
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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