“A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often – just to save it from drying out completely.”
~Pam Brown
Every year thousands of small businesses start up. Some fail, some thrive. But there’s one particular business that has caught my eye.
A couple of days ago my mom took out a couple of newspaper articles she had clipped. One of them was from the LA Times about a funny little business that ships parcels to it’s patrons. It’s called Quarterly Co. I had only intended to skim the article but in the end I ended up visiting the website. Opened in 2011, Quarterly Co. is a business that uses “snail mail” to ship its customers mystery boxes from different celebrities. From Bill Nye to Tim Ferriss, these boxes contain little pieces of the contributors hobbies and interests.
While I was reading I was reminded of my class’ idea farming process. Not too long ago Quarterly Co. had some financial problems and they nearly went bankrupt. This block in the road reminds me of the “make changes to succeed” step in idea farming. Because even if you manage to come up with a good idea, take the steps to plan it out, and execute the proposal, if things don’t go the right way sometimes even the best of ideas can fail. But Quarterly Co. made a couple of good business decisions and made a few changes, by the end of March, 2012 they made about 1.25 million.
Anyway, I highly suggest taking a quick look at their website, it’s very clever and the different suppliers are interesting. Who knows, maybe something will catch your eye and you’ll become one of their customers.
You can read why Zach Frechette started up the Quarterly Co. here.
A little bit more about Quarterly Co.:
The Ink Menagerie 