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.

Another way we connect with our customers it through our blogs. We have a unique culture at Zappos, so we thought it would be great for customers to get an inside look at what our company culture is like. We give our customers a peek inside of our company almost every single day:

http://blogs.zappos.com/

By reading through the blog postings, customers can learn how we treat each other internally at Zappos, because ultimately that’s a pretty good indicator of how we’re going to treat our customers. We also publish a culture book once a year. We ask all of our employees to write a few paragraphs about what the Zappos culture means to them, and except for typos, it’s unedited, so you get to read about both the good and the bad. If you’d like to get a copy of our culture book, just search for “culture book” on the Zappos.com web site.

At the end of the day, we believe that our culture is our #1 competitive advantage. Competitors can eventually copy everything else that we do, but they can never copy our culture. Therefore, we believe that the more we can convey our culture and our true personality to our customers, the more successful we will be in the long run.