The discs that OneDisc produces range from full-size 4.7 gigabyte DVDs to 30 megabyte business-card size CDs. They contain whatever the client chooses to include—typically, educational or marketing-oriented text, video, and photos. The company also produces custom shapes. For instance, OneDisc produced a heart-shaped CD-ROM of information on cardiology-related products from Minneapolis-based ProVation Medical, a medical-procedure documentation company. In addition, OneDisc designs the envelopes, booklets, and wallet-size carriers that house its discs. The company produces about a million discs per year, overseeing the process from creating a CD master to testing to distribution.
Tom Vanderpool, who owns OneDisc with his wife, Carol, had been a product manager for 25 years at 3M, where he worked on 3M’s pioneering efforts in digital media, including the development of the first CDs in the early 1980s. He saw how well customized marketing CDs were selling for 3M’s customers—and how increasingly easy they were to produce—and believed he could carve out a spot in the market.
“I had made the rounds in the company,” Vanderpool says of 3M. “The main project I was working on was cancelled, and I took that as a sign that it was time to graduate. I had built a lot of good contacts within 3M, and 3M transferred a lot of those orders to us.”
Carol founded the business in 1999—a good and a bad time to start a business like OneDisc. The tech market was booming, but the bust was on its way; OneDisc’s staff would shrink from 13 to 5, and sales would fall by half when the bust came. OneDisc survived by diversifying into DVDs, adding more and different types of content and capabilities, and developing a wide variety of product packaging.
