Our family has been in the furniture business for 36 years, with roots in the fireproof file cabinet and safe industry. We began selling products on the Internet in 2002 and went from a small-town business to a large corporation in a few short years.
We place customer satisfaction and ethical business practices above all else. Customer happiness will always be more important than the bottom line. This "small-town" outlook on business has brought us success, and we will never deviate from it.
It has been an interesting journey for the crew at Keystone. We started our online adventure in May of 2002. In our first 6 months of business we had exactly $3,899.32 in sales. At that time we wondered if selling online was the best idea. Perhaps we should just sell in the store and be happy?
In 2003 things began to change. We knew we had a great product, but how could we get people to know about it? We took the time to learn about internet marketing. That turned out to be very difficult. It may be hard to believe, but in 2003 there were only a few marketing companies specific to the internet. Most of them were companies like the Yellow Pages trying to move away from the Big Yellow Book and into the internet. They did not know what they were doing.
We continued the search and did find some companies specific to advertising on the internet. There were actually Pay-per-Click companies that did not charge you for every visit to your web site. Imagine that! When we first started marketing on the internet we paid $15 per month for all the visitors we wanted to our web site. Perhaps some of you in marketing remember a company named Looksmart or Overture?
That little bit of marketing introduced our fireproof file cabinets and safes to people who did not know where to buy these beasts. When our products started getting into peoples' businesses and homes word began to spread. With the profits from this we expanded our marketing.
Then we discovered Google Adwords, just getting themselves going. In 2003 we paid our first bill to Google Adwords for $66.93. That was for 408 visits to our web site. I will do the math for you. That is 6 cents per visit. You don't want to know what we pay now!
In any case, Google Adwords brought our income to nearly $500,000 for 2003. In 2004 with customers coming back and more marketing through other search engines we reached $1,500,000. And the rest is history.
The internet was a very simple place in 2002, and it honestly did not take much work to make a lot of money. It has changed immensely since then. It takes more work than we could possibly have imagined to keep an internet business successful today. But we love the challenge!
Our current clients include individuals across America, small colleges and large universities, up-and-coming businesses as well as large corporations, and small to large government entities. In short, we have sold to all types of places and all types of sizes. We cater to everyone!
Keystone Safe Company
1093 N County Road 50 E
Danville, IN 46122
TAX ID: 20-2033098
BUSINESS TYPE: Small (SBA Self-Certified, Verifiable in SAM
DUNS: 153757104
UEI SAM: H515TMFM1JN