Here's a true and great story about growing "net new" e-business just in time for Spring of 2003 that we know you'll want to hear about, especially in today's challenging economic climate full of "I'll put off everything until things get better" decision-makers afraid even to buy another cartridge for their printers: Seattle Pottery's decision to move forward with an upgraded web site and an affordable e-catalog and the already promising Spring results.

In January, instead of having more angst about a slow economy, and all the gloom and doom about an impending war with Iraq, owner Jim Lunz of Seattle Pottery Supply, a top supplier and manufacturer of ceramics supplies and kilns in the Pacific Northwest since 1975, decided to take his existing business and web site to an important "next phase". The challenge was the cost of the print catalog and printing, and continuing to pay the high cost of mailing out so many copies of a print piece that even before printing was already out of date. There was also the challenge of how to take better advantage of the Internet. SPS's own existing "web presence" web site was still just sitting there, while other competitors had already enabled e-commerce, and the challenge now was how to do something even better.