We crossed customer one thousand in November 2021, six and a half years after the company started. There was no founding-story event. There was no viral moment. There was just a thousand decisions, mostly small, that compounded.
The first hundred (2014–2016)
Came almost entirely through word of mouth in the southeast Wisconsin manufacturing community. A co-packer would call us, we would do the job well, that co-packer's contracts manager would mention us to the contracts manager at a peer plant. We sent zero marketing emails in this period. We did one trade show, badly.
What we learned: the early packaging customer talks to other early packaging customers. The plant-floor network is real and it does not care about marketing copy. It cares about whether you showed up on the Saturday you said you would.
The next four hundred (2016–2018)
Came through a mix of word-of-mouth and a Google business listing. We figured out, slowly, that "Gaylord boxes Milwaukee" was a search term and that ranking on it brought us inquiries.
We started writing a couple of articles a month about what we do — the grading rubric, the sustainability math, the buyout process. The articles ranked. Some of the inquiries that came in were not a fit, which was fine. Most of them were.
What we learned: writing things down, honestly, brings the right customers. Trying to write things down to manipulate ranking brings the wrong customers.
The next five hundred (2018–2021)
Two things changed. First, our first closed-loop program launched in 2019 and gave us a longer-form story we could tell to bigger customers — the "we are not just transactional, we run programs" framing. Second, COVID made local supply chains matter much more than they had. Customers who had been buying packaging from out-of-region vendors suddenly wanted somebody an hour's drive away.
By the end of this period we were turning down inquiries that did not fit our volume model. That was a new experience. The reason to turn down a customer is that taking them on hurts the customers you already have. It is a counter-intuitive discipline that pays back over years.
The thousandth
The thousandth customer was a small co-packer in Pewaukee who had been our customer twice before — once in 2017 and once in 2019 — and was coming back for a third engagement around a new contract. So technically they were customer 87, depending on how you count. The way we count, they were 1,000, because they were our 1,000th distinct active relationship.
We sent them a thank-you note. They were briefly confused. Then they laughed.
What did not work
- Cold outbound email. Tried it in 2017. Got two replies from 800 sends and one of them was a complaint.
- Trade-show booth swag. Spent $4,400 on branded coffee mugs at one show. Got two follow-up inquiries.
- Hiring a brand consultancy. They wrote us a tagline. We could not use it without laughing.
What did work
- Showing up on the Saturday.
- Writing things down.
- Honoring quotes when commodity prices moved against us.
- Being honest about the cases where we were the wrong vendor.
None of that is novel. The hard part is doing it for seven straight years.