Dodge, dip, duck,dive, and…uh…dodge

Yesterday we gathered up all the Zen employees for a little enlightenment and then a little dodge ball. Our Q2 meeting was the first time since the first of the year that we could all get together as a company and discuss all the great things going on at ZenPrint.

The directors over technology, operations, sales and marketing presented updates on their divisions before we were fortunate enough to hear from consultant and entrepreneur Walter Noot. Walter has been kind enough to help us out over the last couple months in an advisory role and had some great points on the state of the ZenPrint business.

After some pizza and the awarding of this quarter’s ZenBuddah award to our Director of Sales Lianne, we all headed over to Airborne Trampoline for some dodge ball. It wasn’t long before most of us were calling time outs to catch our breath. All in all, it was a great way to get the company together and release some stress.

Lianne with the coveted ZenBuddah Award

The calm before the storm………..

Gathering ammunition

Seconds before our CEO JD (in green) gets taken out!

Life at ZenPrint – The Christmas Party

Well 2010 is coming to an end and what a year it has been. New clients, new product features and a lot of new hires. Keeping in line with the traditional ZenPrint way, we decided to crash our CEO and Founder, JD Gardner’s house (or more appropriately his lovely wife Sarah’s house) for the annual Christmas party!

After a rocky start….JD’s car rolling backward into our Sales Director Lianne’s car….the party turned out great. With lots and lots of BBQ, drinks, and cheesecake consumed, everyone was in high spirits. After dinner came the games and prizes. Some employees made out like bandits while some went home with random seasons of Seinfeld.

All in all, the Christmas party was another fun and entertaining time with some great co-workers. We are all looking for with excitement to see what 2011 has for ZenPrint.

ZenPrint Adds New Director of Sales

Today we are pleased to announce that we have made another hire on the ZenPrint management front. Lianne Argeris is our new Director of Sales. Lianne will head up our internal sales department, working closely with marketing to drive new client acquisitions.

Lianne has extensive sales experience that spans the small entrepreneur to large enterprise sales. She joins our team after leaving Oracle Technologies as a highly successful Business Development Lead for their CRM product line. She has a BSBA in Marketing from Northern Arizona University and is well established and knowledgeable in helping companies maintain and grow brand recognition.

Lianne hails from Park City, UT, so by default she is an avid outdoor enthusiast and even ran a ski shop before beginning her career. You’d be hard pressed to find her on the weekends during the summertime as she is usually in some remote campsite enjoying one of Utah’s many starry nights.

ZenPrint Hires New Onboarding Manager

In response to our ever growing customer needs, we have hired a new Client Onboarding Manager. Bryan McEntire joins the ZP team to assist new and existing clients fully utilize their ZenPrint applications. But instead of giving a brief overview of Bryan, we thought we would let him say a few words about himself. Buckle up!

“Born in suburban Salt Lake City to a post-Hare Krishna father and feminist mother, my formative years were spent neck deep in art, books, religion, and adventure of all kinds, especially in the southern red-rock deserts of Utah. This broad range of ideas and aesthetic sensibilities shaped me into a curious soul, forever searching for the mental quickening that accompanies all creative and intellectual discoveries.

I am largely self-taught in the skills I use every day: photography, web-programming, and graphic design—always the perpetual student. Having studied history and anthropology at the University of Utah off-and-on since I was eighteen, I plan on graduating in one or both of these fields sometime in the next decade.

Along the way I have been a ditch digger, janitor, cashier, customer service jockey, web administrator, sculpture studio assistant, and manager for bookstores and call centers. In 2006 and 2009, selections from my portfolio were featured in the Downtown Salt Lake Rio Gallery and the Springville Museum of Art in 2008.”

Wow! It is safe to say, ZenPrint will never be the same.

ZenPrint’s New Director of Marketing

We are excited to announce that ZenPrint has recently hired a new Director of Marketing. Daniel Royer has joined ZenPrint to help oversee our corporate marketing activities and partner marketing initiatives. Daniel joins us from EMC, where he was the product and channel marketing manager for Mozy, their online backup division.

Prior to that, he was the partner marketing manager at HP’s Logoworks division where he directed co-marketing campaigns with companies like American Express, Office Depot and LegalZoom. Daniel has a B.S. in Business from Lee University (TN) and an MBA from Oral Roberts University.

Besides his new role at ZenPrint, Daniel is the Creative Director for Operation61, a local non-profit (which just happens to be a ZenPrint client too) that assists victims of human trafficking. He is an avid runner and with his Operation61 race team, enters in everything from 5ks to the crazy Ragnar Relay Race series which covers 200 miles. According to Daniel, running by itself is not that fun, but running to help people is worth all the pain!

New Creative Director Brings Years of Design Experience to ZenPrint

Everyone’s heard the old adage,” if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Well Ben Vines has been helping out ZenPrint for a while now with everything from website design to sales collateral. Ben is a very talented graphic design and we felt it was time that he became a permanent fixture at ZenPrint.

As ZenPrint’s Creative Director, Ben is responsible for all aspects of ZenPrint’s brand management. He has been influential in creating the user-friendly web interfaces for our online products, as well as comprehensive sales, marketing, and support collateral. Previously, Ben was a Senior Marketing Designer at Logoworks which was successfully acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2006. He moved on to open a successful design studio known as Further Creative, which has done work for other Inc. 500 companies including Skullcandy and MonaVie.

Zenlightenment, Buddha Awards & Rootbeer Chugging

We aren’t super huge on meetings at ZenPrint.  We all have plenty to do as is.  We have a daily scrum meeting with development team, a weekly sales and marketing meeting and another weekly product and strategy meeting.  Otherwise, we are mostly just going with the flow getting stuff done.  Then every once and a while, we hold an all-hands company-wide meeting.  On Tuesday, we gathered up all the Zen Troops and had one such meeting…and a lot of fun in the process.  Everyone showed up, including a few of our newest employees Ryan, Rodrigo, Jim and Alex.  We are excited to be growing so quickly and have these talented additions on board! The morning was filled with much vision and inspiration courtesy of ZenPrint Founder/CEO, JD Gardner and newly-appointed President, Jeremy Wycherly.  Big things are a foot at ZenPrint as we are on a mission to help brands change their old ways of branding, printing & marketing. It’s out with the old and in with the new in 2010. We are pumped!

ZenPrint President, Jeremy Wycherly, enlightening and inspiring.

So, even though we are mostly all business, we like to let loose every once and a while as a company and just have some serious fun!  We divided into three groups, which represent the three primary divisions of ZenPrint:  Technology / Sales & Marketing / Print & Operations and played 6 different games.  One person from each team competed for a chance to earn $25 in cash, plus help the team win a pizza & movie party.  It was fun but clearly brought out our competitive spirit as well.  In the end, the print/fulfillment team showed their stuff and won the pizza party.

Who’s got the fastest hands at ZenPrint?

Look at that form!

Feather blowers.

Chad took home the Buddha award. Look at that proud guy! Congrats Chad!! More on the elusive Buddha prize coming soon to a future blog post near you…

Last but not least… The Rootbeer chugging contest. Look at ZenPrint CTO, Nate Jensen letting everyone else win. What a nice guy!

99 Designs visits ZenPrint from Down Under

Recently, our mates from Australian-based 99 Designs, made a visit to our cold climate of Salt Lake City, Utah, to discuss a partnership we have brewing — about which we are all very excited! If you haven’t heard about 99 Designs yet, let me explain what they do in the simplest way possible. In short,  99 Designs is a community in which thousands of designers are competing to win a variety of design contests. Design contests include logo design, website design, business card design and many others. Cash prizes are awarded by the contest holder to the designer they think has the best design.

We are in the process of creating a unique feature for 99 Designs where contest holders can see what their logo designs will look like on all sorts of print products and design templates. Everything from business cards to t-shirts. We hope it’s going to be another great addition to the already immensely popular site. Check out a screenshot below:

(click to zoom)

If you think 99 Designs is the only good thing to come out of Australia in recent memory, you would be dead wrong to say the least. Here are some more of our favorite things to come out of OZ. Let us know if we missed anything….

Midnight Oil’s Lead Singer Peter Garrett

Boomerangs

Crocodile Dundee

Kangaroos that box

The Gladiator (Russel Crowe is from Australia)