Maria Halkias of DallasNews.com wrote a piece on a survivor of the .com bubble of the late nineties. Cufflinks.com. Halkias did a good job conveying where the company is now and how it got there from those crazy bubble days of 1999 – 2000.
From the article:
Cufflinks.com was founded in 1999 during the dot-com bubble, when lots of startups were created based on the business model of a category word followed by “.com.” But this one survived beyond its cutesy domain name.
And the company is thriving as young men get more bold about their wardrobes, adding fashion beyond their dad’s uniform of khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt.
Cufflinks has 700 retail customers ranging from small online retailers and regional specialty stores such as Dallas’ Culwell & Son to major retailers, including Nordstrom, J.C. Penney, Kohl’s and Amazon.com.
Song says he gets funny looks and comments like “that’s cute” when people ask him what he does — until he mentions Neiman Marcus is a big customer.
That’s a badge of distinction for a company with 20 employees and sales projected to be between $7 million and $10 million this year.
When your products are tiny, even if there are 4,000 items in stock, the warehouse can be down the hall from headquarters. The company’s size encourages camaraderie.
Cufflinks’ online national sales manager Brendan Haas has been known to run in and add something to an order that’s about to be picked up by the UPS driver. “A few years ago, we were having all the customer service calls forwarded to my cellphone after hours.”
Read the full article on Dallas News.com