Last mother’s day, we screwed up. Big time.

We had these brand new customizable photo bags we were gonna put up for sale. They looked beautiful, and you could upload any photo to have it baked into the fabric with heat. High quality finish, for $100+. It was perfect for moms, so we scrambled to get it up fast so our customers could order them for Mother’s day delivery (the bags take a couple weeks to create.)

We stayed up all night, but we got it done. And aside from a few early glitches, it worked! The orders came in, and people started writing in to tell us how excited they were to be getting a custom bag. It went on like this for a couple weeks before we found out. Almost a third of our orders had never gone into manufacturing. A technical glitch had prevented us from seeing them, and with a week left until M-Day, it was impossible to get to deliver on our customers’ promises. We were about to have a bunch of very angry customers (and moms!) on our hands. I didn’t know what to do.

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There’s an age-old saying in the business world that “people buy from people”. The implication is that at the end of the day it’s the real human connection between two individuals that motivates a transaction.

As it turns out, the same is true in the world of microcredit. When Kiva.org first went live in March of 2005, it was an experiment to see if people in the developed world would be willing to loan money to low-income entrepreneurs clear across the globe – individuals they would never speak to or meet. We strove to build what human connection we could through profile pictures, background stories, and progress updates from the borrowers.

The experiment worked, and it worked in ways Matt and Jessica Flannery, Kiva’s founders, could never have imagined. Today Kiva has facilitated over $25M in loans in over 40 countries – and this success is in large part due to the relationships that are established between the lenders and borrowers. Microcredit is not charity; it’s empowerment and it’s a partnership, and there’s something incredibly tangible about living in Iowa and lending to a farmer in Afganistan through Kiva.org. As it turns out, “people loan to people”.

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Over the past 8 years, Zappos.com has grown very quickly. In 1999, the year the company was founded, we had almost no sales. Since then, our historical gross merchandise sales numbers have been:

2000: $ 1.6 million
2001: $ 8.6 million
2002: $ 32 million
2003: $ 70 million
2004: $184 million
2005: $370 million
2006: $597 million
2007: $840 million
2008: $1 billion (projected)

We’ve been asked by a lot of people how we’ve grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple. Our top priorities are company culture and customer service, which has resulted in repeat customers and word of mouth being the #1 driver of our growth. We believe that one of the most important ways for us to deliver “above and beyond” customer service is by letting the personality of our call center reps shine through. This means that, unlike most call centers, we don’t have scripts and we don’t measure call times. Each of our reps are are encouraged to let their individual personalities shine when talking with our customers, because we don’t want to come across as just another faceless company.

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