Did you know that the logo for Ultrapom was based off of folded coral tissue paper from my wedding? I love that color, and love the idea of additive color as layers overlap. This is a photo from my own wedding, which kind of started it all. Burlap was so hot back then.
After a debut year of building an online presence and doing our first events, our second year, 2012, was all about growth – in more ways than one. As my business was taking off, I got pregnant with my first child, and my husband and I decided to go back to Australia to have our baby there. SO! I was running my new business from halfway across the world, while my friend, Kerry, worked part time doing the work that needed to be done on the ground (she is now my long time business partner), helping get orders ready, and making table runners (chevron was so hot back then as well). We were starting to get more out of state orders, especially to California. We were also starting to understand the biggest challenge of shipping rental products – getting them back. This soon became our biggest challenge in running a shipping based business.
But at that time, our focus was national, and shipping shipping shipping. Probably 80% of our business was not in Kansas City. To expand our offerings, we developed a line of shippable chuppahs. FedEx and UPS has limits to how long a package could be, so we had to come up with more compact chuppahs that broke down into shippable pieces.
Sometimes, however, people wanted one of our large non-shippable chuppahs. And we were just green enough and hungry enough to figure out how to make it happen! That’s how we ended up doing the chuppah Ashley Biden’s wedding (you may have heard of her dad, Joe). With the help of my dad, we made giant wooden boxes (that kind of looked like caskets…), and freighted our Branch Chuppah to Delaware. Unfortunately, we have never seen photos of the actual ceremony, though I would love to!
By the end of the year, we had grown by 3000%! And we were still working out of my little 2 bedroom house. But it was starting to burst at the seams.
DISCOUNT: In honor of all our chuppahs, we are offering a flash sale of 25% off our Chuppahs and Arches! For this discount, please contact us at info@ultrapom.com and request the 10 Years Chuppah and Arch Discount!
