Egg Carton Business Growth

A story about how Sarah Moore bought and grew a business called egg cartons.com, transforming it from a niche egg packaging company into a broader specialty packaging business.

"When I first bought the business, the first couple years things were on the decline a little bit. I made quite a few mistakes and it wasn't looking too promising. I initially thought I was in the egg industry, so I was looking at what's the duck egg market like, what's the chicken egg market. But really, when I got in it, I realized I'm not in the egg industry - I'm in specialty packaging.

It was actually a lot more of an opportunity than I ever realized. I wasn't some genius figuring this out, I just looked at our order history. We were getting orders from people selling crickets and dubia roaches, people using egg cartons for small parts, bath bombs, cupcakes. I estimate now that 40% of our revenue has nothing to do with eggs.

When I realized that potential and our specialty in proprietary products, I spent most of my time focusing on that - not on having an amazing modern website, but focusing on these products that I call 'sticky.' These are products where we're making custom molds for customers that they'll keep buying from us.

Then COVID came - COVID was like cheating because we 5-6x'ed during COVID. It was a combination of recognizing how big our market really was and then recognizing that COVID was an incredible opportunity for us to take all of our capabilities and run with it."