Loft Resumes sells designer-made CVs — 66,000 visitors in month one

Two friends launched Loft Resumes in late February 2012 with the tagline "Style-Conscious Resumes for the Standout Job Seeker". It was a tiny bootstrapped side project, so orders had to come from free attention; the paid AdWords campaign they tried later cost more than it returned.

Sell the resume itself as a design product, hand-typeset by artists, and launch through the design world's own channels so galleries and blogs do the marketing.

Co-founder Emory Cash designed an award-worthy site that won entry to CSS design award galleries. Caldwell emailed the Fast Company writer who had covered his earlier business, and her article ran in week two and became the biggest sales day yet. He then spent a day pitching the bloggers ranking for "creative resumes", offering free resumes as giveaways to their readers, while a 72-hour Fab.com flash sale in week five sold more than everything before it combined.

From the February 21 launch to mid-March, Loft Resumes logged over 81,000 visits (66,000+ unique) and 209,000 page views, with roughly $10,000 in sales in the first month. Its biggest non-Fab day, eight orders, came the day after the Fast Company article appeared.

In late February 2012, Dodd Caldwell and Emory Cash launched Loft Resumes, a service selling "Style-Conscious Resumes for the Standout Job Seeker". Instead of Word-document templates, every CV was a designed artifact — custom-typeset by graphic artists with revision rounds included — so the resume itself was the product.

The launch ran through the design community's own channels. An award-worthy site earned listings on CSS design galleries; Caldwell emailed the Fast Company writer who had covered his earlier startup, and her feature ran in week two and became the service's best sales day (eight orders). A day spent emailing the bloggers ranking for "creative resumes", backed by free-resume giveaways for their readers, kept traffic and orders arriving steadily.

In week five, a Fab.com flash sale ran for 72 hours and sold more resumes than Loft had sold in total until that point, with bloggers who spotted it on Fab writing about the service afterward. From launch to mid-March the site logged over 81,000 visits (66,000+ unique) and 209,000 page views, and the founders reported roughly $10,000 in sales in the first month.

The postmortem was blunt: only free or nearly free promotion had worked, AdWords lost money, and the product was polarizing — commenters called the designs gorgeous while others warned about automated resume parsers. The founders answered that their resumes parse cleanly and advised keeping a plain-text version for job boards.

The product itself was the media: a beautiful site won CSS design award listings that brought backlinks and credibility with zero paid spend.

Each promotion stage stacked on the last — journalist feature, blogger giveaways, then a retail flash sale — instead of relying on one channel.

The Fab.com sale added urgency and put the designs in front of an audience that blogged about them, compounding the reach.

The founders measured everything in Google Analytics, so they could see that earned channels produced orders while paid ads did not.

Engineer earned media in stages: award galleries build credibility, a journalist who already knows you spikes sales, blogger giveaways sustain them, and a retailer flash sale multiplies reach.

Sales stayed elevated after the Fab sale and the press around it, and the founders saw steady traffic from Pinterest pins and Facebook shares. Their next steps were referral partnerships with resume writers and career counselors, plus experiments with new channels — though they concluded that only free or nearly free promotion was working, which was effective but unpredictable. The Hacker News discussion (229 points) debated whether designed resumes survive automated screening; the founders replied that theirs parse well and suggested buyers keep a text version for job boards.