This story is part of our 1,000 stories campaign. What’s your story?
Your Name: Carolyn Lanzetta
Business Name: Plum Print, a service that turns children’s artwork into books
Type of Business: Children’s Goods & Services
Location: Candler, North Carolina, United States
Reason for starting: Plum Print was born out of a desire to preserve and celebrate our children’s artwork in a better, more sophisticated way. My New York City apartment was being overtaken by piles of my daughter’s artwork; I had incredible parental guilt throwing any of it in the trash, but I simply didn’t have the room to store it all. Plum Print solves this problem. We take your children’s original artwork, digitize it and transform it into a simple, yet elegant coffee table book. Parents love the solution for storing everything; children love the ability to access all of their creativity by simply turning the pages of their “published” book! This process has now given my daughter the most treasured book she owns – the one that published her own artwork. She now has the ability to access her own creativity at her convenience. It gives her pride, inspiration, and the urge to create more and more!
How do you define success? Success for us will be changing the way people think about preserving these precious pieces of artwork and using that financial success to give back to our communities.
Biggest Success: Our first huge success was being “in the black” rather than “in the red” just 10 months into our business! That success was due to consistent orders that began with one of our busy seasons (the end of the school year) and never let up, due to customers trying us out and then coming back again and again. Most recently, a huge success was being accepted into the Tory Burch Foundation/Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses entrepreneurial program. We can’t wait to tell you about our biggest success in 2014!
What is your top challenge and how have you addressed it? Our top challenge is improving our operational efficiency to catch up with our growth. We are working hard to put the right staff in place to not only handle our volume, but to create new procedures to improve our operations.
Who is your most important role model? We are surrounded by role models; we would not have been able to build Plum Print from the ground up without tons of role models all around us. From our business advisor who has helped keep us focused and accountable to our friends who have brainstormed with us over beers, everyone willing to spend hours of their own time helping to build a business they believe in is a role model to us. We will certainly “pay it forward” helping entrepreneurs down the road.
Website www.plumprint.com
Twitter twitter.com/plumprint
Facebook www.facebook.com/PlumPrint
Pinterest www.pinterest.com/plumprint/
Read about another entrepreneur in Children’s Goods and Services here!
Edited by The Story Exchange.