Apr 18, 2016 8 Questions with: Jesse Genet from Lumi.com
I had the pleasure of meeting Jesse Genet, designer and Founder of Lumi.com last November during the LA open house tour of start-up companies called New Co.
I arrived at the Lumi warehouse early on a Friday morning where I was greeted by cheery front office folks with coffee, tea and every kind of bagel and cream cheese option that you can imagine. After perusing the spread, I looked around at my surroundings and I was mesmerized by the sheer size of the place. I was later informed that the warehouse space was 12,000 square feet. Whoa! This is a start-up?
If you’re a start-up company or small business and you don’t know about Lumi, you’re missing out. Lumi exists to support the needs of companies that want to scale branded packaging. The minimums are crazy low and the quality is extraordinary. They have everything from branded stamps to embossing tools to gold foil ribbon and several kinds of branded tape. If it’s boxes, mailers and dust bags you need, they have those in many sizes just waiting to represent your brand. But wait, there’s more! Lumi also makes vinyl decals, metallic decals and silk screen kits! You can also get reusable tote bags, pre-inked stamps and branded butcher paper.
Jesse prepared a demo of the most popular Lumi items to show us how easy it is to DIY our own packaging or have Lumi print it for us. Honestly, after the demo, it was very difficult to walk out of there without picking up some branded butcher paper for myself, you know, to use around the house.
Lumi is solving an age-old problem for start-ups. How do I open my business today and look design centric and professional? You call Lumi, that’s what you do! Jesse’s design capabilities, clean branding and passion for small business make Lumi your go-to packaging partner.
Here’s eight questions that I asked to help you get to know the woman behind the brand Lumi.com.
Where does the name Lumi come from?
I named Lumi when I was 16 years old and I was working on our first product ever — Inkodye. It’s a fabric dye which develops its color in the sun. Lumi evoked light and it was a four-letter word that sounded fun. I was a teenager and decided that was the name for me.
Over the years, Lumi has come to represent so much more than just light or Inkodye. Now, Lumi.com has dozens of custom, branded supplies and products that we sell. The Lumi name is a part of our history and stands for the entrepreneurial journey of ourselves and our customers.
Describe the evolution of Lumi. How and why did you get started?
My cofounder Stephan and I met studying Industrial Design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. I was working on this cooky side project, mixing dyes and playing with printing processes in my small apartment when Stephan and I quickly realized that we were much better at building projects together outside of school than doing our homework. Within a year of meeting each other, we launched our first Kickstarter campaign to raise launch money for our first Inkodye kit under the company name Lumi. We’ve been building a business together ever since.
About a year and a half ago, Stephan and I realized that we had an incredible community of thousands of designers and entrepreneurs who had really good questions about how they could bring their own print and project ideas to life and how they could bring their own product ideas to market. It dawned on us that we could take our knowledge and expertise of growing our own product-based business from scratch (Inkodye), and help to build something far more powerful for our community.
In March of 2015, we launched the new Lumi.com. We have quickly scaled to sell dozens of customizable supplies that our community of entrepreneurs and designers truly need. We carry custom packing tape, custom boxes, and more inexpensive options like stamps and silkscreen kits. It’s been an incredible adventure to take a skillset that Stephan and I developed and honed over the course of five years running our own business and share it with other business owners.
What is the hardest part about leading your own company and team including running your own factory/warehouse? What is the most rewarding part about the same?
In general, one of the hardest aspects of being an entrepreneur is that you don’t really have a safety net and the success or failure of your business doesn’t just help or hurt you. The network of people participating in your business from your employees, team members, and fellow business owners, to your investors, stakeholders and customers are relying on you to be successful in order for them to be successful. That is a tremendous amount of pressure because the truth is that to do your job correctly, you need to take risks constantly. If you play it too safe, you can’t build an interesting or innovative company, but with every risk you take, you feel the pressure of all the people in that network who are relying on those decisions you’re making. It’s all very exciting and rewarding and if you’ve surrounded yourself with good people, then it’s also a very fun process despite the days where things don’t quite go your way.
In terms of the day-to-day of running a 12-thousand-square-foot facility and warehouse, let’s just say — life is never boring. Whether it’s dealing with a new swell of stray cats or the fact that a delivery truck may take down your neighbor’s telephone pole, there’s always a new logistical problem to tackle.
What was the biggest risk in diving in to start Lumi and why did you go for it anyway? What advice do you have for would-be entrepreneurs sitting on the fence?
The biggest risk I’ve taken so far was simply choosing to be an entrepreneur instead of getting a full-time job or building a resume. For the first several years of Lumi, I wasn’t able to pay myself a regular income. It was sporadic and scant. The truth of the matter is that the biggest risk of jumping in and starting your own business is the cost of opportunity. You give up the other things that you could be doing with your time and life and instead take a leap of faith that your time is better spent on your own venture, even if it doesn’t work out.
My advice for someone sitting on the fence is to get off that fence. Honestly, the only reason I’ve gotten this far with my business is that I’ve been very decisive and spent very little time questioning whether or not I should be an entrepreneur. Don’t get me wrong, my life is filled with existential fretting, but I spent all of my fretting energy thinking about which decisions I should make for the future of my business. Time spent fretting about whether or not you should be an entrepreneur in the first place, is (in my opinion) wasted energy.
What are you guys currently working on? Where do you see Lumi going in the future?
Right now at Lumi, we’re focused on what we call the Lumi dashboard. We’re rolling out a new onboarding form in the next couple weeks where brands will be able to fill out a few simple questions, give us their logo files, and we will be able to send them a Lumi dashboard filled with custom design packaging and supply ideas for their business.
In the future, I hope that designers and entrepreneurs feel like ordering custom packaging and supplies is just as easy as ordering toothpaste on Amazon. The world of custom packaging is currently very opaque. It’s dominated by old school brokers and distributors that don’t always have the entrepreneur’s best interests in mind, and I know that we can change that.
What is your favorite Lumi product?
I’m going to say custom tape. Lumi.com is the only place on the internet where someone can upload a graphic and order custom tape and I’m really proud that our minimums start at just 10 rolls for gummed tape and 36 for packing tape.
Custom tape is something that growing businesses want to use, but don’t think they can afford. With Lumi they absolutely can afford it! Custom tape goes a really long way and it does a lot to make you look as professional and polished as bigger businesses. It’s empowering to know that the tape you’re ordering on Lumi.com is no different than the tape used by big businesses like Amazon.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew-up?
I remember when I was in the fifth grade, we had to write down in the yearbook what we wanted to be when we grew-up. I had no idea what to choose and I was also sort of a class clown, so I wrote down “an adult.” The good news is, I really feel like I’ve done that! It’s hard to fail when you set yourself up for success.
Where do you personally find inspiration?
I’m a big fan of sustainable living and small living. I live full-time in an Airstream trailer and I really enjoy gardening, composting, and teaching myself how to do things and learning survival skills. I derive a lot of inspiration from those activities because they remind me of how little we need to survive and I enjoy the things that I have even more.
Read more about Jesse Genet’s story and the inkodye process here. Step two, open for business.