Jim Brown

Sell, sell, sell and within 4 years we had 160 staff with an office in Belgium, one in Germany, a distribution centre in East London and it had grown and grown and grown, but, I realised the future wasn’t in telesales for me, it was in the internet. I also wanted to sell original cartridges and have business customers that love us and wanted to come back to us, he said there’s no money in office supplies but I said, well, I think if you do it nicely you build a good brand and customer base, you’ll make money in the long term and not worry about the short term gain. I sold my shares to him and started Paperstone as an online ink cartridge business, and very quickly customers started saying, can I have paper, can I have this, can I have that and within a year we had grown considerably and have grown year on year ever since. We have customers who are still with us now who ordered from us in the first three or four months, we look after people. It’s always about what the customer wants and we have a really loyal customer base that have stayed with us for eight to ten years.”