The Citizens Voice - Entrepreneurial Ambition: Pepperjam president and CEO runs multi-million dollar business
BY NICHOLAS SOHR
STAFF WRITER
07/13/2008
Eight years ago, Kristopher Jones sat on his grandparents’ couch, espousing the finer points of producing and marketing a spicy, sweet jam based on his grandmother’s secret recipe.
That venture started with a phone call in 1999, when Jones was a graduate student at Villanova University studying experimental psychology. His older brother Rick asked him to start a business selling something, anything online to capture a slice of the enormous potential both saw in the Internet.
Earlier this month, Kristopher Jones, 32, sat in his third-floor Wilkes-Barre office with a view, keeping an eye on his staff of about 115 and discussing his foray into high-technology territory occupied by the likes of Google, the unquestioned king of most things Internet.
Chalk up the shift to good timing and Kristopher Jones’ ability to turn his experience marketing Grandma Jones’ Pepper Jam into Pepperjam, a company that has grown exponentially in the past several years providing the same services to others looking for an edge in cyberspace.
“We put ourselves right in the middle of that wave,” he said. “Never in a million years did I think it would turn into what I’m associated with here.”
The Jones brothers, aged seven years apart, often discussed going into business together when they were growing up.
“Instead of just talking about the scores of the baseball games, we would talk about what was going to be big, how things would change,” Rick Jones said.
Both brothers saw profits to be made through the Internet, as money was pouring into the medium from start-up sites, venture capitalists and advertisers. The question remained, however, what could they build their site around that would keep visitors coming back?
A short discussion lead them to the jam their grandmother made since emigrating from Ireland early in the 20th century.
They began cooking up pots of the stuff, often into the early morning hours, under the same name their grandmother used — Mississippi Mud.
Mud, however, didn’t last long under the practiced eye of employees at igourmet.com.
“Mud is something that you maybe let the kids play in occasionally, but you say to them ‘God forbid, don’t eat it,’” Kristopher Jones recalls a friend at igourmet saying.
A google.com search for similar products turned up “Pepper Jelly,” a product found mostly in the Midwest and New England states. A minor tweak led the Jones brothers to Pepper Jam.
“It’s been an incredible advantage to us to have that name,” Kristopher Jones said. “It’s short, it’s punchy and it really differentiates us from our competitors.”
Kristopher Jones kept the name when he spun off the marketing division in 2000, to form the company he heads today.
He was conducting interviews with celebrity chefs and industry experts for the jam Web site when he saw the cross-promotion potential. The chefs were sending their fans to watch the videos of the interviews.
The first check for a month’s worth of traffic totalled just over $30.
Several years later, Kristopher Jones was pulling in $140,000 per month helping companies pull Web surfers to their sites.
From 2003 to 2006, Pepperjam grew 550 percent, expanding its yearly revenue to $4.8 million and finding its way on to Inc.com’s list of the fastest-growing companies in the country.
Kristopher Jones says he expects Pepperjam to maintain 100 percent annual growth in the next few years driven by a new affiliate marketing division headed by his wife, Robyn.
Affiliate marketing allows advertisers to pay owners of Web sites where their ads are displayed on a pay-by-performance basis. Pepperjam’s service, Pepperjam Network, ranks fifth in the industry behind Google Affiliate Network.
Kristopher Jones said the Pepperjam network could, in 12 to 18 months, grow larger than Pepperjam’s current business.
“I’m pretty darn confident about it,” he said. “We have not gotten started yet.”
