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My wife Annette and I launched DigMyPics.com in 2002. We had the idea to start a
photo scanning business after preserving our own family’s legacy photos. The
startup was a hit and immediately began to experience tremendous growth. It
became clear that there was a growing public interest in digitizing services.
High quality archival scanning at volume prices is the company’s main focus.
Each month, as the demand for digitizing services grew, we implemented new and
better internal processes to grow with it. By 2007, DigMyPics had grown into a
multi-million dollar business with more than 40 employees, a new video transfer
department, and an online storage service called Expo. By the end of 2007 we
purchased a 17,000 sq ft building and were gearing up to take DigMyPics to new
heights.
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Adversity and Resilience
With the wind at our backs, we were on top of the world. Then suddenly,
everything changed. At 2am on Monday May 5, 2008 DigMyPics suffered a
devastating fire which completely
destroyed our building and most of its contents. It seemed unlikely to everyone
that much of anything could be recovered from the piles of ashes and broken
dreams left behind. Annette and I, though shell shocked and dazed, explained to
the fire investigators the importance of what lay in the ruble and then within
72 hours we secured a temporary space and rounded up our employees to form a
recovery team. We worked together to painstakingly recover as much as possible
from the rubble of the fire. Understanding the immense trust our customers place
in us when they send us their memories, we decided we wouldn't stop until we
were sure we had recovered everything recoverable. We dedicated more than 4 1/2 months and spent
over $600,000 on our photo and video recovery effort. In the end, our efforts
paid off. We recovered more than 110,000 photos and over 30,000 feet of movie
film. We worked to keep our customers up to date through a blog that I
maintained during the recovery. (read the events as they transpired on the the recovery
blog) Most surprising and inspiring to us was the incredible support we
got from our customers, many of whom continue to send us new projects.
(click
here to read some of the email we received from customers) It was
through that support and the incredible sense of community we experienced that
we decided that we needed to rebuild DigMyPics.
We understand that sending your photos off to some faceless company you've
never heard of can be scary so we want you to get to know us. Please read about
who we are and if you have any questions or comments please don't hesitate to
call or write. Annette, the whole DigMyPics team and I promise that we will
treat your memories as if they were our own, that we will do all of the work at
our facility right here in the USA and that everyone that handles your order,
from Customer Service, to Scanning, to Shipping and IT are all in one place,
working together. That means, when you have questions or issues we can respond
quickly.
We're more dedicated than ever and everyday we strive to deliver a quality
service that we believe in and feel good about. Quality and Driving innovation
are a part of our culture and you can see it in programs like Don't Want, Don't Pay
and Real Time Scanning. As part of our
commitment to giving back, we recently partnered with Operation Photo Rescue,
a non-profit photo restoration service that helps victims of natural disasters
and in 2007 we gave more than $17,000 to Operation Smile
to fund nearly 70 cleft palette surgeries. We are very proud of what we do and
we hope to have the opportunity to share it with you. From all of us at
DigMyPics, we thank you for visiting us and we're looking forward to making you
smile all over again!
Sincerely,
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