Craftom: Work and Ship from Anywhere
Interview with Caleb Musser, Founder of Craftom
Tell us about your business. What do you do?
The Craftom platform makes it easy for companies to send hyper-personalized gifts, essential supplies and office equipment to anyone, working from anywhere.
What is your startup’s origin story?
We launched the Craftom platform in January, 2020 on a traditional direct mail model. Once Covid hit in March, we saw very quickly that the old method of shipping packages to corporate offices was obsolete and built our remote shipping product over a weekend. We quickly landed some major accounts like Hitachi, Proofpoint, MongoDB and others who started using our platform to engage decision makers working from home through hyper-personalized gifting. We also realized that WFH/WFA is here to stay and all types of products will need to be shipped to remote workers homes. So in addition to gifts, we also added office supplies and IT equipment to our platform to help our customers send any physical product to their employees with a personalized, branded experience.
Had you been involved in the industry before this startup? What is your background?
Yes, prior to launching Craftom, I ran a corporate gifting and marketing agency for 5 years called Musser & Company. We had over 40 professional sports teams and Fortune 500 brands as clients and executed gift projects for CEO’s, NFL owners, and even Presidents of the United States.
What’s unique about your company? What are the key differentiators between you and other players?
Our software platform has both traditional AND remote shipping tools built in for the new work from anywhere environment. We’ve also invested heavily in product design technology, meaning every package and product can be personalized with a different logo, name and photograph — whether shipping 1 or 500 packages at a time (we sometimes say we’re like “Shutterfly for B2B”). Lastly, our platform runs on a marketplace model and we believe in supporting small businesses and social impact companies — we have woman-owned, minority-owned and veteran owned vendors on the platform and products that supply drinking water, help human trafficking survivors etc.
Take us through a day in your life. What does the typical day look like?
6–9: personal and family time and working out, 9–5: innovating and iterating our platform, developing sales and customer success strategies and closing deals, 5–9: family time, 9–10: wrap up loose ends and prepare for the next day.
What has been the most challenging part of growing your company?
Marketing a gifting platform to marketing and sales teams is an extremely crowded space to break into, we’ve had to work extremely hard to separate ourselves from the competition and become a holistic solutions for sales, marketing, customer success and HR teams.
What has been your best marketing channel? What are some channels you are looking to explore next?
LinkedIn organic by far. Developing an inbound strategy with paid ads and SEO is something we’re focusing on for 2021
What apps do you use that you would recommend to others?
We use Google, Salesloft, Seamless.ai, HubSpot, Slack and Zoom daily
Do you have a book, podcast, or Youtube channel you would recommend to other Entrepreneurs?
Books: Shoe Dog, Titan, That Will Never Work, Rocket Fuel, Built to Sell, Steve Jobs Podcasts: Masters of Scale, B2B Growth, Built to Sell Radio, Upside, Business Wars, How I Built This
If you could go back in time to the day you founded your company, what advice would you give yourself?
Buckle up, it’s 2020 :)
What’s something you’ve learned from building your business that someone else can learn from?
Railroads. Oil. Electricity. Internet. WFH. We are experiencing the biggest industry disruptor since the internet. Companies are fundamentally changing how they work forever. Are you innovating to thrive in the new landscape or just surviving?
