The Tiny Prints Blog

In the last post (which was awhile ago…we’ve been busy!), I touched on key concepts we learned during the past year and our commitment to take action on those new ideas. This blog post will be dedicated to how we plan to put that commitment into action with strategic areas of focus for 2011.

First and foremost, we’re continuing our dedication to the people. For the current staff members in the Tiny Prints family, this means preserving and building upon the culture that already thrives here: revamping how we provide feedback, being transparent about how we are doing as a company and where we are headed, changing how we think about compensation and also creating more ownership in the company through rewards and personal recognition.

I am happy to say that all of these changes will take effect in the next 60 days. At that point, we will look to add 50 to 60 new employees this year through revamped recruiting processes, clearly defined ideal employee attributes and new ways of welcoming new hires into the company.

To you, the customer and reader, our priorities are equally clear this year. We will continue to strive toward becoming the outright platinum standard for customer service. This isn’t a new goal, and it’s part of the reason why we refuse to ever call our customer service or production design teams “call center reps.” We will train employees, add new processes, drive down costs and increase efficiencies to ensure that we serve as a concierge to our customers with the highest quality standards around. As a result, customers will receive their products faster, with higher quality and at lower cost.

Next, we’re going to tackle our second brand pillar of design. We’ve been established as a trendsetter, but we want to push ourselves to become iconic, standing for style and cutting edge design. This year we will push the envelope so that we continue to put distance between ourselves and the copycat competition. By the time they catch up and copy us, we’ll be on to the next big thing!

“By the time they catch up and copy us, we’ll be on to the next big thing…”

Lastly, technology serves as the final pillar of our brand, and we are investing heavily into our goal to move from great to greater. This means reexamining how our technology is built, how it scales and what we can do to improve the overall experience of our customers and internal users. We are going to be blazing fast, incredibly reliable and absolutely superb in every aspect of the user experience. And, as we always do, we’ll probably introduce a few new ideas to once again define Tiny Prints as the pioneer in our space.

For all our customers, employees and competitors out there, that’s our 2011 plan in a nutshell. We’re not a public company, but we’ve always been transparent about our goals and standards. That’s because we believe the true value of a plan isn’t by creating a playbook to follow, but in the execution of the strategy that takes you one step closer to your goal. We’ll have another great year if we execute well, and to execute well we’ll once again rely on the strength of our people.