This is a picture our little family in October 2011. Just one month before PhotoBarn was born.

It is impossible to tell from this beautiful photo with coordinating outfits and happy smiles, but behind all that, we were exhausted and desperate. We had been fighting a losing battle for 4 years and had just taken another serious blow.

At the end of 2008, we joyously welcomed our first baby boy. Almost at the exact moment that we started building our family, we saw another area of our life start falling part. The ‘Great Recession’ took us all by surprise – and we were particularly vulnerable. We had enjoyed great success in the years leading up to the recession. Todd sold and invested in real estate. Lindsay was a photographer and, with Todd running the business side, had built up a successful studio employing several photographers. In our young-married and pre-child state, we traveled a lot, had hobbies and tons of free time.

We call this our ‘Fun With Dick and Jane Moment.’

The recession worked swiftly to dismantle all financial stability in our family. Our businesses took an overnight 75% hit. Savings quickly dissipated. Real estate holdings were sold off to bring in cash to pay basic bills. Credit cards helped but were maxed out quickly.

There were many, many sleepless nights.

Our primary burden was a real estate investment we had made at the exact wrong time. One year before the recession we stuck our necks and purchased a home to convert into office space. The excitement of the prospects of this project quickly turned to dread as it became a millstone around our neck. The only thing that kept us sane as we struggled to ward of creditors and keep food on the table was our adorable little red head boy. Moments of pure joy and happiness were intertwined with the harsh realities starting at us daily.

At the height of uncertainty, we felt a call from God to leave our home, our family, our investments, our businesses in Utah and move to Tennessee.

It made no sense – but we did it.

Lindsay was ecstatic because Tennessee is home for her. And she was excited to get back to her ‘mommy.’ We packed up our belongings, said tearful good-byes, and set off across the country with a one-year old in the cab of a Penske truck in the dead of winter.

For 3 years we fought and clawed our way out of the pit we had fallen in to. It was a constant battle of one step forward, two steps back. We faced multiple floods, significant theft, several brushes with foreclosure.

But it all finally came to a head at the end of 2011. 

We had been working to convert that ill-timed real estate investment in Utah into an office building so we no longer had to pay the mortgage. Miraculously, we had tenants ready to move in, but still needed to build a parking lot and remodel the building to make it ready for the tenants. Our many attempts to finance the project had been thwarted but we had one last hope. A promising investor was considering lending us the $200,000+ needed to finish it. In October 2011, while we were waiting for the final answer from the investor, a knock came to the door of our small rental townhouse. We were served legal papers. One of the main contractors who had been working on the project was suing us for the money we owed him.

With all previous avenues of financing exhausted, all of our hope rested on this one last investor who might be able to bail us out.

While we anxiously awaited the answer from our last hope investor, we tried every way possible to bring in income to pay our bills.

One of these ways was through video work. Since moving to Tennessee, Todd and Lindsay’s brother Nathan had started a videography company called Milestone Pictures. Lindsay taught them everything she knew about photography, lighting, and equipment.

One day in late October 2011, Todd was shooting a video of Lindsay’s cousin Lee and his family. During the course of filming, Todd learned that her cousin’s business was enjoying huge success on Groupon. In the last week they had sold over 5,000 framed names – and they expected to sell another 10,000 or so in the next few weeks.

Maybe that could be OUR ticket? What if we figured out something to sell on Groupon?

Well, the much anticipated phone call from the investor came. With a stomach full of butterflies, Todd answered the call. Our whole future was staked on the results of this call. In disbelief, Todd heard the words ‘I thought for sure this was going to work’ and ‘it was looking so good there for a while but…’ and ‘I’m so sorry, we did everything we could do.’ And finally the question, ‘so what are you going to try next?’

Defeated but trying to muster a little humor, Todd said, ‘I don’t know… Maybe we’ll try to find something to sell on Groupon.’

With no options left, and feeling completely exhausted from 4 years of trying to keep a sinking ship afloat, it seemed it was time to just throw in the towel and lose it all. However, we got on our knees one last time, as we had many times over the previous years, and cried out to God for help. Only this time was a little different. We truly had no options. There was nothing we could do to fix this. A miracle was our onlyhope.

And that’s when the magic started happening.

For the next few weeks we pushed and expanded the idea. Made new variations.

“The 2×6 feels clunky, maybe we should go thinner.”

“Would this work on a wooden cube?”

“What if we added ribbon…or twine?”

We were in a race to get a viable looking business up and running to present to Groupon in time for Christmas sales. With a pending lawsuit and persistent creditors calling non-stop, we were desperate for relief.

Our first photoshoot was thrown together in our apartment. We quickly built a website using a free template online. We priced our product specifically to sell on Groupon. We knew we’d have to offer 50% off our retail prices on Groupon AND give them 50% of the discounted price. So we worked backwards. We figured out what our costs were then what we wanted to make per item sold, doubled that, then doubled it again.

On Sunday, November 20th, we had a completed website. All except the URL, that is. We sent the website to Lindsay’s cousin to see what he thought and if he’d get us in touch with Groupon. Lee agreed to connect us with Groupon.

Incidentally, November 20th is a very important date to us. It is Lindsay’s birthday. It is also the day we met.

And it is the day that PhotoBarn was born.

With so much riding on this phone call, Todd was a mess of emotions when he answered.

‘Hi. This is Rachel from Groupon.’

After a few pleasantries were exchanged, Rachel said, ‘Well, I have some good news and some bad news.’

Todd’s heart sank. He shot a disappointed look at Lindsay who was waiting on the edge of her seat.

Unable to bear any more bad news, he said, ‘Let’s start with the good news.’

Rachel explained that PhotoBarn had been approved to run a deal on Groupon Knoxville in early December. This would likely result in a few hundred orders. While this WAS good news, it was not nearly enough to even make a dent in our financial problems.

‘So are you ready for the bad news?’

Reluctantly Todd said, ‘Ok.’

‘Well, I showed your website to the Groupon National reps…and here’s the problem… They LOVED your product so much that I’m afraid I won’t be able to be your Groupon rep for much longer. I’m sure they’re gonna want to take over your account and do some big things with you!’

I think if Rachel had known how much was riding on this deal for us she probably wouldn’t have been so playful with the answer. ????

In disbelief, Todd looked over at Lindsay with a huge smile and a thumbs up, all while trying to maintain a normal tone of voice and the illusion of professionalism with Rachel on the phone.

With a website, a URL (photobarn.co, because www.photobarn.com was already taken), and a Facebook page, PhotoBarn was ready for business.

Within a few days, we received our first order. A set of five 2×2 PhotoBlock ornaments – ordered by Todd’s sister Beth in Arizona.

On December 5th, 2011, PhotoBarn launched on Groupon in its hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. As expected, the deal did well and sold almost 300 orders in Knoxville alone.

Side note: December 5th is also an important date for us because 7 years prior on December 5th, 2004 we hung out for the first time and started falling in love.

While the prospects still looked good to run a national deal with Groupon, we were disappointed to find out that we were too late to get on their 2011 holiday schedule.

We’d have to wait until the beginning of 2012.

Lindsay’s cousin Heather was working for another deal site named Plum District and had seen us advertising PhotoBarn on Facebook. She reached out to us about putting together a national deal with Plum District.

That deal ended up selling over 1,200 orders before Christmas.

We quickly found out that it was a blessing that we were too late for a larger scale Groupon run. In all of our excitement to sell orders and obtain some financial relief, we had no clue what it would look like to produce and ship 100 to 200 orders, let alone 5,000 to 10,000 orders.

Our apartment was quickly transformed from a research and development facility/photo studio into a production facility.

The garage was the wood shop where cutting and sanding happened. Lindsay’s desk was the design center where images that customers had emailed in were individually touched up and cropped. The dining room became the gluing station where images were applied to the wood. The kitchen sink became the rubbing station where the paper was moistened and rubbed off the boards leaving the ink imprinted on the wood. One part of the office became the finishing station where ebony and dark walnut stains were applied to the edges of the boards. The other part was the hanging station where ribbon, twine or sawtooth were attached. Customer service was in the living room next to the box building station. And the oven was the shipping table.

Todd would fill up his 4Runner daily with 20-30 packages and drop them off down the street at the FedEx store. As the deliveries started to grow in size, FedEx store employees, probably getting tired of the daily deliveries, informed Todd that a truck could actually be scheduled to do a pick up daily at the apartment.

Huh, never knew that…

Many friends and family were hired to come over whenever they could to produce orders. It came down to the wire, with a few local packages being hand delivered on Christmas Eve, but we did it.

We had pulled off our first successful Christmas!

We laugh about this picture now, but this is how we really felt. ????

In early January, Todd received another phone call from Chicago. We’d really grown to love the 312 area code.

Todd quickly ran out the front door to take the call so the sounds of the 3 year old and 9 month old boys wouldn’t be heard.

It was Eric from Groupon Goods. The mac daddy of all Groupon platforms. Much bigger than Groupon National. Eric explained that Goods wanted to run us sometime in January but he wasn’t sure which week. Beyond ecstatic at the news, Todd tried not to seem too eager but asked, ‘For our planning purposes, how many orders would you expect us to sell.’ In his head Todd was thinking, ‘Please say at least 5,000. 7,000 would be amazing. 10,000, now that would be awesome, but let’s not get carried away.’

Eric confidently replied, ‘You’ll sell around 15,000 orders.’

What!? Fifteen. Thousand. Orders!?

If we learned one thing during Christmas 2011 it was that we had to find a new way to create our product. Doing it 100% by hand created a number of quality and scalability issues. If we had a hard time getting several hundred orders out over Christmas, how on earth would we manage 15,000?

We now had somewhere between one and three weeks to reinvent the way our product was produced, find a warehouse, find employees, and locate materials for 15,000 orders.

We began researching options for printing on wood. We knew quite a bit about photography, videography, and real estate…but we knew NOTHING about the print industry. With Google and YouTube as our resources, we set out to find an affordable way to get ink on to wood. And we found it. For about $20k, we could get a small printer that could do the trick.

About that same time we received our first check from Plum District, for about $20k. As you can guess. We took all the money we made from Christmas and bought a printer. And it actually worked! It could produce 6 times faster than we could by hand and the quality was great.

Late on a Friday afternoon in mid January 2012 Chicago called again. This was it. Eric from Goods was on the call and he had a confirmed date for us.

“Congrats! You are set to run on Goods on Monday.”

“Monday? Do you mean Monday in a week and a half? Or Monday in 3 days…?” Todd replied hiding his fear.

“Monday in 3 days. Is that a problem?”

Trying to keep his cool, Todd said, “Not a problem. Let’s do it.”

Todd’s head was spinning. Waffling between the joy of having a confirmed date with Goods and the overwhelming amount of things that needed to happen in the upcoming days and weeks. And it was already after 5:00 on Friday evening.

Minutes later Lindsay came bounding down the steps.

“I have some news,” she said nervously and excitedly.

“I do too!” replied Todd, “we are running on Groupon Goods…in 3 days!”

“Well, that’s a good thing because we’re going to need a bigger house!” Lindsay said as she handed Todd a positive pregnancy test.

Bring it on.

The first few weeks of January 2012 came with their fair share of news – both good and bad.

Good News. We bought a printer that worked AND we had a confirmed date with Groupon Goods!

Bad news. The contractor in charge of the interior remodel of our office project in Utah walked away from the project and took the $40,000 deposit we had given him months prior. The money for this deposit was borrowed from one of our close family members and was never recovered from the contractor.

Good news. We found out we were pregnant with our third child!

Scary (yet exciting) news. Our youngest baby boy was only 9 months at this time meaning that our two youngest babies would only be 18 months apart. Not something we had planned on…but definitely a welcome surprise. The kind of ‘scary’ news we could definitely deal with!

After finding out on a Friday night that our Groupon Goods deal would run on the next Monday morning, we spent the weekend frantically preparing.

We had previously picked out a 1,700 square foot warehouse space in the event Groupon Goods confirmed a date with us. A Friday night call secured this space – ready for us to move in on Monday morning.

Now…where to find some immediate labor overnight? Our church community came through big time and within days we had about 5-10 people lined up ready to start Monday morning.

With high hopes we anxiously awaited the launch. At 1:01 am eastern time on Monday, January 23rd the deal went live on Groupon’s website.

We sat glued to our computer screen. At exactly 1:01 eastern time we clicked refresh on the Groupon Goods website.

There it was! It was live! Would anybody buy it??

A long minute or two went by with no sales. From our admin view, we could see sales real time.

‘1 of 15,000 sold’

There it was! The first one sold! Two…five…ten…twenty sold.

How were we doing? Was this a good pace? Should we be selling more??

We stayed up for an hour hitting refresh every few seconds. When it finally got to be around 2:00 am eastern time, we decided it was time to get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.

It was like Christmas morning. Immediately upon waking up, we rushed to the computer to check sales.

‘197 of 15,000 sold’

Should there be more than that? Seems like kind of a slow start…

Time to get ready for the day. Lots to do. Meeting with new employees at 9:00 am at the townhouse. Then over to the warehouse to get keys and start setting up. Need to load up the printer that’s currently in the basement and move it over to the warehouse. How are we going to set up the warehouse? What do we need? Who knows…but let’s just get over there and start figuring it out.

Sometime around 10:00 or 11:00 am the emails started going out to all the Groupon Goods subscribers. Somewhere around 60 million of them.

And that’s when it started getting fun.

‘470 of 15,000 sold’

30 seconds later: ‘524 of 15,000 sold’

A minute later: ‘676 of 15,000 sold’

Five minutes later: ‘981 of 15,000 sold’

All day we watched as the sales velocity increased. Thousands of orders came in. Our refresh button almost wore out. By the end of the first day of sales, we had sold 7,700 orders.

Almost Eight. Thousand. Orders.

Our deliverance!

On Groupon Goods, our offer would be available on their website for one week or until it sold out. Customers who purchased a voucher from Groupon had 4 weeks from the date the offer ended to redeem it. Once a Groupon voucher was redeemed on our website, we had 2 weeks to ship that product.

This meant that ALL orders from this Groupon offer would have to be fulfilled in a VERY short period of time. If we sold 10,000 orders, we’d have to ship all of them in 3-6 weeks.

Immediately, Groupon customers began ordering on our website. They’d pay the shipping directly on our website and many chose to upgrade their products with stain and ribbon/twine. With hundreds redeeming per day, this brought an influx of immediate cash into the company. Much needed since the first Groupon check wouldn’t come until 3 weeks from the day the deal launched.

And we were broke.

We continued to watch sales climb: 9,000….10,000….11,000.

A few days in to the Groupon offer, Todd gets a call from Chicago.

‘It’s Eric. Congrats! Your deal is doing amazing. We’re getting close to selling out. Want to add more codes?’

“Yes! Of course we do.’

5,000 more codes were added and sales continued to climb.

At the warehouse, things were abuzz.

Tables being purchased. Shelves being built. Employees being hired. Boxes and supplies ordered. Training people. All day, every day. Early morning to late in the night.

We’ll need more printers. A lot more. Doing the math…one won’t cut it. We need 3…maybe 4. Can we fit them all? That’s another $60,000 in equipment. How do we finance them?

Another printer was ordered immediately with the funds coming in through the website. But we’d have to wait until the first Groupon check arrives to order the other two. That check is still 2-3 weeks away. It’ll have to work, there’s no other way.

Coming off the high of selling over 17,000 orders in a week, only 2 months after we started the company, reality was staring us hard in the face.

Time to get all these orders out in the next 5-6 weeks.

So what did we have to ship? Here’s the breakdown of the Groupon orders:

10,368 orders of 3 5×7’s (a total of 31,104 5×7’s)
5,541 orders of  8×10 PhotoBoards
1,966 orders of 5 2×2 cubes (9,830 cubes)

For a company that just 5 days earlier had one printer operating out of the basement of an apartment, this was a monumental task.

In early February we received our first Groupon check. $122,648.21. Hallelujah! This was the same amount of the first piece of real estate Todd had purchased years prior. Unbelievable.

We currently had two printers on site. A big chunk of this first Groupon check went to purchase the final two printers. We’d have to run them 24 hours a day, but we could still make it. We needed to be shipping around 372 orders/day to stay on track.

But we weren’t even close yet.

We were struggling to get 75-100 orders out per day. We needed more people. We needed more supplies. We needed those two more printers.

The two last printers showed up on the same day. As always, it took a few days to get them up and running.

Finally, we were ready to go. With 4 printers operating 24 hours/day we could print around 1,200 5×7’s per day, or 400 orders. It would be tight but we could make it.

Oh how wrong we were.

From the moment the final two printers showed up on site they were nothing but trouble. The colors were off. “Magenta overspray” became the most common phrase in the print room. Print head errors. You name it, it was happening. And it seemed the issues were contagious. The first two printers that had functioned quite well for the first two weeks also started having issues.

Todd talked his brother Matt in to moving from Utah to Tennessee to work for PhotoBarn. Matt drove across the country, showed up at the apartment, put his things in his room, caught up with Todd, Lindsay, and the kids for about 10 minutes. Then, probably to Matt’s surprise, Todd said, ‘Well, are you ready to get to work? Let’s head over to the barn.’

After a 30 minute crash course on the printers, Matt took over the dying print room.

It was an impossible task keeping even one or two printers running for more than an hour or two before they’d malfunction and be useless for 2-3 hours. We had the printer manufacturer’s number on speed dial and spent hours a day on the phone with them troubleshooting issues. They sent service techs in to help on numerous occasions, but things never got better.

It wasn’t uncommon for employees to show up in the morning, ready to post coat, stain, and ship PhotoBoards to find only a handful of orders to process. Instead of producing and shipping 400+ orders per day, we were lucky to get out 50-100.

Customers were starting to notice. It had now been 2-3 weeks since some had placed their order so they were getting nervous. We had typically been able to get by with one or two customer service agents, but the flood of emails and phone calls started ramping up. Before we knew it, we had a team of five agents. That grew to eight. And then to ten.

With very few real answers to give customers, agents tried to explain that our equipment was having issues and we were working day and night to resolve the problems. We couldn’t give them an ETA. We couldn’t specifically track their order. It was an impossible situation.

March 23rd, 2012 was Luke’s Birthday – he was turning one. Lindsay was eight weeks along with baby number three. On this Friday in March, instead of celebrating a birthday, we were anxiously trying to figure out a solution to our desperate situation.

It had now been two months since the Groupon Good deal had launched. The queue of orders was only getting larger. The flood of customer service inquiries was overtaking us. Groupon was now getting nervous and peppering us with questions and forwarding all the customer service complaints they were receiving. At the same time, their sales team was anxious to get another deal on the calendar with us because of the success with the first. And we were running out of money.

It finally dawned on us. We needed to stop fighting these 4 small printers we had purchased and find another solution. This was a painful realization because we had just spent $100,000 on this equipment a few months before. But we just couldn’t get them to work. So how were we going to print? We were extremely inexperienced. Just a few short months before we never dreamed we’d own a printing company.

Someone suggested, ‘Maybe there’s a print convention going on somewhere? You know, one of those huge conferences with tons of equipment and vendors? Surely we could figure something out there.’

We found one. And it wasn’t too far away. Orland, Florida – a 10-12 hour drive from Knoxville…but doable. So when is it? March 22-24th. Wait, right now!? Ending tomorrow at noon!?

It was clear what we had to do. We’d drive through the night, show up at the convention, and have about 4 hours to find a new printing solution.

We loaded up the car that evening and took turns driving through the night. We arrived in Orlando in time for a quick breakfast.

David, a friend from Knoxville, happened to be in Orlando at Disney World with his family having recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan. He had production experience and was thinking of joining us at PhotoBarn. He met us at the exposition to help out.

Stepping on to the massive convention floor was more than overwhelming. Equipment the size of small houses was set up around every corner. Many people stopped to sell us stuff but it was like they were speaking a different language. We felt like idiots. We just needed to find a reliable way to print ink on wood – but we didn’t really even know who or how to ask for help.

We split up, everyone going in a different direction, in an attempt to cover the gigantic floor in the 4 short hours we had. We absolutely HAD to leave the convention with a new printing solution.

We practically sprinted through the convention getting a crash course on the whole industry. The picture started getting clearer. Certain technologies and process were ruled out.

With about an hour left, Todd and his brother Matt were nervously walking together trying to find something that felt right.

Suddenly, there it was. It was love at first sight.

We stopped at the Canon booth where several large flatbed printers were set up. We had our eye on a certain piece of equipment. Todd turned to Matt, ‘That thing is amazing! How much do you think it is?’ He pointed at a beautiful, large, fast printer. It looked like a tank. After the horrible luck we’d had with our small, wimpy printers, we wanted something indestructible. We both guessed it was somewhere in the $500,000 to a million range.  We were hoping to keep our solution around $100,000.

A Canon salesman named Wes approached and we asked him for a price. We were pleasantly surprised to hear a number that was far closer to our budget than we expected, but still much more than we wanted to pay. We negotiated with him until the very last minute of the show and got the price to something we could swallow – even if it stretched us a lot more than we wanted.

We left Orlando with a signed offer for a printer and a credit app with Canon. Now how would we buy the thing?

It turns out Canon couldn’t finance the printer. No banks could finance the printer. And we couldn’t find any private investors. We were just too risky as loan candidates. Our credit had been shot because of the recession and real estate woes. Our business was just too young.

So we moved to Plan B.

Todd contacted Wes from Canon to see if he knew anyone else in our area that had that exact same printer. If we could just find someone who would let us use their printer until we could buy our own, we’d be back in business.

Wes didn’t have any options in Knoxville, but there was a guy in Atlanta who may be able to help…Al.

Al is a kind man with a thick accent. He had recently purchased the EXACT printer that we wanted. His shop was on the north side of Atlanta, about three hours from Knoxville. Al warmly agreed to try and help us out. We sent down some wood to print some samples. We hadn’t yet confirmed that this printer could create the exact product we were after.

The first set of samples came back. They weren’t right. The prints looked dull. The color didn’t pop. Something was off.

We tried again…and again…and again. Even Canon was involved at their headquarters trying to create samples we could be happy with. We just weren’t getting there.

We had lost a few more weeks trying to figure out a solution and things were getting really bad. Our money was almost gone. Groupon was on the verge of writing us off forever. Thousands upon thousands of customers were angry and waiting for their products.

It seemed like there was likely no way out of this mess.

At 5:05 pm on a Friday evening, Todd and Matt pulled in to Al’s shop in North Atlanta. Anticipation was high. If this worked, PhotoBarn would have a future. If it didn’t, it was over.

They set up in an office. Todd, Matt, Al, the color expert, and one of Al’s employees. How do we fix the color? Why can’t we make the resolution as good as the prints we’re getting off the small, unreliable printers? Test after test, tweak after tweak, and it only seemed to be getting worse. Lindsay was texting Todd incessantly for updates, praying for any bit of good news.

After a few hours of dissapointing samples, finally, a breakthrough! The resolution was fixed. The print was clear and beautiful…except for the color. The tweaking continued until…there it was! A gorgeous print. This was actually going to work!!

Immediately, Todd sent two words to Lindsay, ‘It works.’

Todd was too busy getting things set up to give Lindsay more updates. The boxes of wood, sliced into 5×7’s, were unloaded and brought in to the print room. Print jigs were created. A crash course on operating the printer ensued.

Sometime around 10 or 11pm everything was set. How many orders could we print in one weekend?

The flood gates opened. We could now print 102 5×7’s in 7 minutes. Even if all four of the original small printers we had purchased were working at the same time (which they never were) we could only print 24 5×7’s in 15-20 minutes.

In an almost zombie-like state, Todd and Matt worked tirelessly, loading and unloading hundreds of 5×7 pieces of wood on and off the printer all night long. The printer was so fast that even at a sprinting pace, they could barely keep up with it. After months of fighting those small printers and maybe printing 50-100 5×7’s per hour, printing 500-1,000 boards per hour felt like consuming a feast after a week long fast.

Adrenalin fueled the all night printing fest. When Saturday morning came along and Al’s team came back to check on the progress, Todd and Matt took a quick breakfast break at Chick-Fil-A while the printer was being serviced. Then were back at it again.

No time for sleep.

All told, there were about 6,000 boards, 2,000 orders printed that weekend. We printed until we ran out of wood, then loaded box after box of printed boards back into the 4Runner, then headed back to Knoxville.

As usual, the PhotoBarn employees showed up Monday morning for work. They had become accustomed to coming in to only a handful of orders to process because most of the printers had been down.

This Monday morning was different. Everyone knew about the Atlanta Expedition – and everyone was dying to find out how it went.

It’s hard to really describe this next part and do it justice.  Todd and Matt pulled up to the barn, like soldiers returning from a long fought, distant battle, the spoils of war in tow. As the back gate was opened and thousands of printed boards were visible, a feeling of triumph spread among our small crew.

2,000 orders down. Only 4-5,000 more to go on the backlog.

We were back in business.