Hello there, Blog Readers!

For today I have another one of our great employee spotlight blog posts in which you can read up on and learn about the friendly faces that can be found at Everything Summer Camp. Read on to find out about Juliann, our Graphic Artist at Everything Summer Camp.

Juliann has been aboard our business for roughly the last five months and boy, have we kept her busy! Her position demands a great deal of know-how, creativity, speed, and determination; luckily for Everything Summer Camp, Juliann is teeming with such skills. In fact, she excels at pretty much everything we throw her way.

Staying hard at work with an assortment of responsibilities, Juliann has impressed us here at Everything Summer Camp with her work and her ability to keep up with this year’s busy season which has been hectic. “There’s a lot of variety that keeps me on my toes,” she says about her workdays.

She often puts her photography skills to good use so we have detailed images of all our great products to show you. She’s in charge of the graphics on our Web site like the homepage slides and a lot more. She works on designs for our camp apparel. And lastly, she does up the images, layout, and even comes up with some fun captions for our email marketing.

Juliann went to summer camp a couple of times when she was a kid—one with a focus on basketball and another with a focus on volleyball. She recalls one summer when she was about ten years old and got to meet Nina Smith who played for the Badgers Women’s Basketball team. It was a pretty big deal to her and the rest of her camp friends Juliann told me with a smile.

That’s all for today, Camp Fans!

Hey there, Everything Summer Camp Aficionados!

Today’s blog post is a real treat—probably even more so for me than for you, devoted reader—because this post is all about me! Allow me to introduce myself. My name is John. I’m the guy whose words you’ve been reading on the Everything Summer Camp Blog.

That’s right. I’m the Writer for Everything Summer Camp. The majority of the words you read on our Web site come from me.

All of our product descriptions, blog posts, and press releases are my responsibility. I help out during the busy season in our Graphics Department too, designing and working in production of our personalized products like One-of-a-Kind Nameplates, Lid Skinz for camp trunks, and camp clothing.

I’ve had a long history of seasonal work at Everything Summer Camp going back to my high school days. I would visit family I had in Eau Claire, Wisconsin for the summer and work in Boyd for Everything Summer Camp during my stay.

Having studied Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Screenwriting, and Journalism in college, I graduated with a Bachelor’s in Writing. Now, I’m thrilled for this opportunity to represent Everything Summer Camp through my words.

I really enjoy trying to give all of our readers something good to read, whether that means my writing is fun or that it gives the reader an easy and accurate description of the product at hand and the benefits that product has to offer.

I went to writing camp when I was little and had a great time! Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of Everything Summer Camp back then. I’d love to do it all again with our products and camping gear. Sometimes I get a little jealous, writing about all these cool products that I’ve now outgrown.

Well, that’s all for today, Camp Fans! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed talking to you so directly on today’s post.

Hey there, Everything Summer Camp Aficionados!

Today I want to tell you about another great employee whom Everything Summer Camp appreciates having onboard. He’s our guy in the shipping/receiving department, Derek. Working alongside Ryan—the manager in shipping as well as Derek’s brother-in-law—and the rest of Ryan’s crew.

Not only does Derek bear enough of the duties that everyone else has in shipping, like picking, packing, and printing orders, but he also handles the majority of Everything Summer Camp’s incoming freight whether the shipments be stock items, equipment for all of our personalized products, or simply overhead for our office building.

Derek, at 24, has been giving Everything Summer Camp 110% for the last five years. Not just a hard worker but a smart worker too, Derek excels at his job on a day-to-day basis.

When discussing his favorite part about the job, Derek says it’s simply the “work flow.” He loves the way the job makes everyone come together, give it their all, and see the job through to the end of the day. The tasks of the job aren’t always the most challenging, but making everything happen in the right synchronicity is another story.

“The job itself isn’t that hard,” says Derek. But still, he enjoys the work. “I keep on coming back, right?” he says with a smile. Derek is normally kept on with part-time hours during Everything Summer Camp’s slower time of the year.

He’s certainly one of our employees who knows what a good time summer camp can be. He fondly recalls his days at Bible Camp with a good laugh over “this kid Mark who snored so loud he sounded like a kid choking,” and kept everyone up for hours after lights out. “It was a good time,” he says.

So, remember, Camp Fans! The next time you get an order from Everything Summer Camp, it very well could have been Derek who packed it for you! Until next time!

- John

Hey, Camp Fans!

For today’s blog post I want to tell you about the manager of our shipping department, and longtime employee of ten years—Ryan. As you might imagine, our shipping department is a very busy place—this time of year especially. But thanks to Ryan and his orchestration with the crew in shipping, you’re sure to get your quality camp gear from Everything Summer Camp on time!

The mark of a good manager, Ryan knows that he’s got to work as hard as or even harder than what he expects out of his crew in shipping. When an order is placed at Everything Summer Camp, it goes through our system and, after any personalized items on the order are made, the order goes to shipping.

There, Ryan prints out each and every order that needs to go out the door for the day. He and his crew will then do what they call “picking an order”. Orders containing camp gear that doesn’t require our own production, gets “picked” from our stocked products. The order is then looked over to make sure that the order is complete and ready to be shipped out to you.

Ryan and his crew then pack the order, box them up, print the shipping labels, and see them off into the back of a UPS truck. Ryan’s been doing this for the last ten years, so he’s sort of a master of his art at this point.

What he loves most about his job is hearing back from “customers who are thrilled

with our product.” He’s also very proud of the work environment that he’s created with his crew and the camaraderie that they’ve established. A giant sports fan, and a local resident of Boyd (the home of Everything Summer Camp), Ryan lives nearby with his lovely family of three. His wife, himself, and their beautiful little girl, Kaylee.

Hey, Blog Buddies!

Today I’d like to tell you about a guy who mostly remains behind the scenes. But, boy is he essential to Everything Summer Camp running smoothly on a day-to-day basis—he’s our Operations Manager, Brian. Operations Manager is his technical title, but really he gets his hands in everything.

Brian oversees every single order that you, our customer, place. From the time your order comes into our system, to the time we ship it out the door, Brian is guiding it the whole way.

As our Operations Manager, he oversees our Camp Trunk Production, our Graphics Department, the Call Center, and the Shipping Department. Aside from that, Brian also handles all of Everything Summer Camp’s general office paperwork, paying the company bills, doing payroll, and so on.

It’s a lot to handle. But then, that’s also his favorite part about his job. He thrives on the diversity that his job hands him. He’s been working here for the last eight years in which his job has changed a lot. Not that his position changed so much as it just continues to evolve. From paying the bills to developing production procedures, Brian’s job always offers him diversity.

Aside from what his position entails, Brian is also the IT guy around here. Since he’s probably the only one at Everything Summer Camp who can set up a closed-circuit network between two locations, he’s our IT guy by default. You can tell just by looking around his office that he knows computers; he’s got wires coming out of the ceiling and computer chips sitting out in a shoebox.

Brian has no doubt that an old job of his at a sporting goods store gave him a good background in sales and office management that has helped him a long way in his current position.

“I love my job,” says Brian.

Until next time, Campers.

- John