Our mission is to become the Internet's leading retailer of craft products. We will accomplish this by providing exceptional customer service and unmatched product selection. Exceptional service goes hand-in-hand with a well-organized business, and will give us the greatest efficiency, buying power, and economies of scale in our marketing communications.

eCommerce is central to our business, because we sell on the Internet. While eCommerce merchants are similar to print catalog merchants, we have the advantage of being able to add thousands of new products monthly. We also have the flexibility of being able to instantly respond to industry trends. We prefer selling to consumers with some level of experience with the types of products we carry, but also to those who want a company that can meet the criteria of broad selection coupled with fast shipping and money-back satisfaction guarantees. We do not generally regard ourselves as a "discounter," and we generally sell products for greater than 90% of the manufacturer's suggested retail price.


Meeting Customer Needs
Our greatest advantage is our fulfillment systems. When the customer shops for products in one of our stores, they are seeing what is available in realtime. When that customer places an order, the order is instantly transmitted to our fulfillment center for processing. We ship over 90% of all orders the same day the customer places the order, but we advertise "Order Today - Ships Tomorrow" so that we can exceed even that lofty expectation. Because all of our brands share common systems and warehouses, we have operational efficiency that many of our competitors do not have.

Not all of our eCommerce brands carry everything that we stock, because we try to find the optimal balance between our premium brands, such as Addicted To™, and our discount brands, such as Frugalities™, where selection is less important than low prices. However, everything is inventoried and managed centrally behind the scenes.

We recognize that customers choose the brand that they prefer for a wide variety of reasons, including existing personal relationships, familiarity, specialized marketing, or other value-added services. That is why we choose to partner with some of our our competitors: so that we can combine our strengths to the advantage of both partners. We have a successful "private label" program, where marketing partners can sell products and then transmit the orders to us. We then fill those orders and ship them to our partner's customers. When the customer receives the order, it has only our partner's name on the package and internal paperwork. By margin splitting, we can provide fulfillment at less cost to our partners than they can do themselves, while at the same time, reaching customers that we otherwise could not reach. It truly is a win-win relationship.


Vertical Integration
We are vertically-integrated. All of our systems were developed in-house by our own engineers. Our warehouse management system uniquely optimizes our operations, and our retail stores on the Internet run our own proprietary eCommerce software. Because of this, we achieve efficiencies that our competition cannot, because they are constrained by off-the-shelf solutions. We use the latest wireless warehouse technologies for inventory management. Weekly optimizations automatically balance our inventory levels and inventory locations within the fulfillment center. We believe that we have the best inventory forecasting model in the industry, and that this helps us to remain an impressive 94% in stock while minimizing the inventory that we need to carry.


Fiscal Conservation
Our company is fiscally conservative. We have never borrowed money, and we don't lease equipment. We have outsourced our personnel department and operate our own in-house data center. We generally purchase top-of-the-line equipment and systems, because we have learned that with good maintenance, these yield the lowest cost operational lifecycle. Most suppliers are paid in advance, and we never ask for extended terms because we can usually obtain significant discounts for being a preferred customer.


We believe that a focus on operations and versatile marketing will allow us to continue expanding our presence successfully into new markets.