Culture » History

Photo: Ellen Lewis

The Short Version... In January 1989, the founders of Papugai began as a design and brand-development agency serving retail, corporate and manufacturing clients with a variety of effective creative solutions. Today, the members of our award-winning creative department are seasoned masters of the same crafts that we loved some 17 years ago. But now there's more ... a lot more. In June of 1998, with the fast-growing popularity of the internet, some of our clients were beginning to notice that their "programmer-designed" websites did not live up to the same professional design, branding and usability standards as did their printed marketing and communications materials. We began to receive requests from clients, new and old, to take over the creative direction and usability strategy of their websites. We had no software engineers on our staff in early 1998, but we were very interested in breaking into web design and software development. The next steps begun a chain of milestones that led to our current set of web-development achievements, including the creation of our most popular e-commerce products, SmartCommerce.NET™ and SmartShip.NET™, and eventually to SmartShip.NET™ International, our celebrated SmartCustomize.NET™ design online (DOL) software, and more than a dozen more technological achievements. (See our Technical Innovations section.) By July, 1998, we began by outsourcing the more complex programming tasks to various development firms for various projects, but that became more and more difficult to manage with larger and more complex projects. Some development firms preferred Linux-based solutions and others preferred Microsoft-based solutions. Some were more sensitive to our clients branding objectives while others were (ahem) less sensitive. We quickly concluded that Papugai needed its own team of software engineers that clearly understood our company's vision for a new breed of web and software-development platform that is expertly-designed and addresses the global business objectives of our clients, including strategic brand implementation, clever and well-planned usability, compelling and effective visual presentation, and razor-sharp business logic. This goal was met within five months of that first day, and by January 1999 our new web-development team was producing world-class websites and inventive applications for web-based services, including extraordinary e-commerce applications and tools. By 2004, we were also offering top-level software development for both Windows and wireless platforms. Today, like 19 years ago, Papugai's 15-member team is still managing cutting-edge design and brand-development projects, but our focus has clearly shifted toward web strategy and other business software solutions. Our e-commerce strategies, applications and tools are currently the most powerful and effective solutions for small business in the United States. 333