A seed of an idea...

Take a seed of an idea, add a heap of enthusiasm and a list of endless possibilities, throw a bottle of wine into the mix and here you have it...  Print Outside the Box!

I'm very impulsive, but not really a risk taker.  So I don't know who was more surprised when Dougie suggested we run our own print business and I said yes - him or me!  But it was a good idea, a really good idea, and when the seed of an idea was planted, it was enough to set my impulsive mind racing and I thought to myself, "we really could do this!".

We started off by looking at buying an established company, but decided that we would set up from scratch, giving us scope to create something that works for us.  Our first requirement was to find a suitable space to work at home, since ultimately our objective is to build a successful business that we can fit in around our family commitments.  Fortunately, having just moved into a larger house a few months ago, we were able to do some re-jigging of our rooms and we now have Print Outside the Box HQ set up at home.  

Next step - research, research, research!  We read a lot, and asked a LOT of questions - what equipment did we need, what costs would be involved, who would be our customers, how would we market ourselves, what stock did we need.... a long, long list and a lot of very helpful people later, and we knew more about the print business than we could have ever imagined!  There's still a steep learning curve ahead but we had what we needed to get started.

Finally, we needed a name for our business - so I sat down with the laptop, a dictionary and a thesaurus and came up with dozens and dozens of suggestions, discounting each and every one.  Then I started thinking about boxes (not as random as it sounds - Dougie's design business is Blank Box Design), and my thought process went down the line of Blank Box Print... but did that suggest box printing?! Discounted... I knew I need to think outside the box... wait, hang on a minute... I do like a play on words... that could work... YES!  Print Outside the Box it became.  Printing where the only limits are your imagination.  I like the sound of that!