Historic Moment...

Last Friday marked a historic moment in PJP history.  HISTORIC, I'm telling you. OUR STICKER PRINTER ARRIVED.  And, OhEmmmmmmmmGeeeeeeeeeeeee, we are officially IN LOVE.  CRAZY IN LOVE.  (Someone cue up the Beyonce, please.)

So look, if you've been reading here for more than a hot second, you know that stickers for our pie boxes are the basic bane of our existence.  They nice ones are expensive.  The cheap ones look, well...cheap.  We've continually struggled with box stickers since our inception, balancing the need to brand our product versus the very real struggle of paying extraordinarily large invoices for stickers that barely last us a week.

When we went to Las Vegas in October for the International Baking Industry Expo, Jeanne and I promised each other that resolving our box sticker problem was our main priority for the weekend.  (Though, I'm not sure either of us believed that it would actually happen.  Finding a solution that proved to be affordable and easy seemed rather daunting.)

I'll spare you the details of the who/what/where/how but to say the company who sold us the printer, Met Speed Label, was super nice to us and listened to our stickering woes without judgment.  And then they told us how to fix it, which is all we've ever wanted to know since we stickered our first box way back in 2014.  (We knew it had to be relatively easy, if we could just find the right people to explain it.)  Here we are in Las Vegas with our salesperson Chuck because we knew then that a selfie of such a tremendous moment would be an important part of the PJP story...

There is a bunch of super not interesting stuff that happens behind the scenes when you order a fancy sticker printer, so it has taken a few long weeks for it all to happen.  Chuck promised we would be sticker making lady bosses by Thanksgiving and when UPS pulled up Thursday afternoon, I knew exactly what had to be in those boxes.

It took a fair amount of work on Friday morning and an epic hour and a half phone call with Chuck, who was kind enough to talk to us both on speaker phone while we tweaked our sticker layout and learned the finer points of making a pie box sticker that makes us look like legit professionals.  We've gone from white Avery labels to...

And the best part is that this sticker wraps the box, thereby making the box tamper proof.  It also lists the ingredients in the pie, provides a "best by" date, includes the product weight, AND a QR code that directs to our website.  It would be no joke to say that Jeanne and I were almost completely moved to tears to finally see our long sticker journey end with tremendous success.

Over the course of Friday afternoon, we created templates for each type of pie we sell.  On Saturday, we were able to test the system of printing-as-needed after baking and letting the pies cool down.  And as it turns out, it is ridiculously easy and quick.  And the labels look beautiful on the boxes, and especially on the front display units.  And if I needed any more reason to love Team PJP, each person working on Friday and Saturday loved them as much as we did...

I seriously just can't even wait to get to PJP Buttonwood tomorrow and bake so that I can then sticker later in the morning.  I bet the thrill doesn't even wear off until we print 1,000 stickers at 2 am on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  And maybe not even then...