48 Years Doing Business in the Flagstaff Community

In the United States, about two thirds of households own at least one pet, and as of 2020, the population of dogs and cats was over 130 million.¹ North America’s enthusiasm for its furry friends makes being in the industry that feeds them a pretty big deal. Nestlé Purina is the largest pet care company in the U.S. in sales and market share. Appropriately, Flagstaff—a town known for its dog-friendliness—is home to one of Purina’s 23 pet food manufacturing facilities. In fact, with 330 associates, Purina is widely considered one of Flagstaff’s major employers.

Manufacturing Pet Food in Flagstaff

The Purina manufacturing facility, with its iconic multi-story building adorned with the checkerboard logo, has been a staple of Flagstaff since opening in 1975. At that time, it was owned by Ralston Purina, which merged with Nestlé’s Friskies in 2001. Flagstaff was a strategic location for the business as it gave the manufacturing facility shipping access to I-40, I-17, and the rail lines, facilitating both import of large quantities of raw ingredients and the distribution of finished product. In fact, of all the Purina manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Flagstaff boasts the largest rail yard, which it uses primarily to receive grain ingredients such as corn, wheat, and barley. Flagstaff Purina also distributes product throughout the West to New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Hawaii, and Southern California.

The Flagstaff manufacturing facility has operated on a ‘continuous operation’ schedule since 2015, running essentially all the time and producing a substantial amount of dry dog and cat food. According to Ramon Martinez, Flagstaff native and manager of the Purina Flagstaff factory, “In any given day, we produce enough pet food to feed over a million animals for one day.” Martinez views continuous operation as a benefit not only to the company but also to its associates, who have access to seven different shift options that can accommodate various lifestyles.

Employee Culture, Benefits, and Safety

Different shift options are not the only benefit that draws Flagstaff citizens to work at Purina. The company is known for being one for the larger employers in town and for offering competitive pay and benefits packages. Martinez also notes that Purina’s culture is one in which “we really value and respect our associates.” The factory’s leadership makes efforts to acknowledge associate successes and foster a sense of ownership over accomplishments. For example, if a particular production line performs exceedingly well, everyone involved in working on and maintaining that line gets acknowledged for their collective success.

Even more crucial than acknowledging the successes of its associates are Purina’s efforts to ensure that every person working at its facilities remains safe and healthy. According to Martinez, “There is nothing more important than the safety of our people and the quality of the food we produce.” The Flagstaff facility implements a variety of strategies to enforce a workplace culture of safety. Safety technicians are stationed in each area of the facility to emphasize the importance of safety to every associate at all times and to serve as a resource for supervisors and hourly team members. Meanwhile, every associate is empowered to stop any process at any time if they deem it unsafe or out of quality specifications. The company also encourages deliberately reflective and safety-focused mindsets among its associates through efforts like: offering an incentive program that encourages associates to hydrate properly, training in “SafeStart” work processes which teach workers the human-based factors that contribute to accidents (such as rushing and frustration), and using its ‘I Take Care’ program to encourage associates to think about their families and stay safe on the job, both inside and outside of work.

Employing Flagstaff Residents AND Their Families

One challenge Martinez notes about doing business in Flagstaff is the limited presence of manufacturing industries in the area. Most associates come in with very little experience working in and around factories, so they need a bit of extra training to develop a factory mindset. This is another reason the emphasis on safety training is so important. Once settled at Purina, though, many of the company’s workers facilitate the employment of other members of their families.

Martinez himself is a great example of this phenomenon. His father worked for the factory in 1987, and Martinez—after serving in the Marine Corps out of high school—joined him as a packing operator in 1998. Martinez worked his way through several positions both in Flagstaff and later at Purina’s headquarters in St. Louis before returning to Flagstaff to serve as Factory Manager this July.

For Martinez, the return to Flagstaff was a welcome one. “This is home to me. I was born and raised here,” he explains. Apart from having a history with Flagstaff and having family in the area, Martinez appreciates all the amenities the town provides. Outdoor recreation like hiking and fishing, along with beautiful surroundings and clean air, are among the qualities that Martinez and many of Purina’s other 330 associates value about living and working in Flagstaff.

Working to Better the Flagstaff Community and Beyond

Purina’s associates are active contributors to Flagstaff and surrounding Arizona communities. The company routinely provides pet food donations throughout the state to organizations like humane societies, pet rescues, and food banks—donations that in the last two years have added up to over 31,000 packages of food. Purina has also hosted Veteran “Stand Down” events in Flagstaff, Williams, and Twin Arrows that offer benefits and services to Veterans, including food and treats for their pets. Many of the company’s leaders also serve as board members for local non-profits including United Way, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Flagstaff Young Professionals, and others. Purina even partnered with the City of Flagstaff in 2008 to donate some of its land for building a fire station in exchange for the City paving and widening the access road to the facility, now named Nestlé Purina Avenue.

In addition to its various partnerships with the local community, the Flagstaff factory actively participates in Nestlé Purina’s sustainability initiatives to reduce its environmental impacts and ensure a better world now and in the future. Purina Flagstaff has for several years been “zero waste for disposal,” meaning that all of its discarded materials are recycled, reused, recovered, or composted—a status that Purina now claims for all of its facilities. Likewise, Purina is working toward using 100 percent renewable electricity across all its factories by 2025, and a large solar array at the Flagstaff location is an important component of those efforts.

Open to Innovation

One way that Flagstaff Purina stands out in its industry is in its willingness to innovate and to try new techniques and technologies. For example, the facility was the first to implement a Technical Training Center (or TTC) to give its maintenance associates hands-on training on modules meant to replicate the equipment and mechanisms they might encounter on the factory floor. Now, these TTCs are being used throughout Purina facilities. Associates at Flagstaff also innovated a method for dry cleaning key process equipment, leading to elevated hygiene levels and reducing the discharge of solid materials into drains, as well as decreasing water usage. This practice was adopted by all dry pet food facilities.

Even when innovations don’t originate in the Flagstaff location, the local team is happy to take them on and find out if they might improve their work processes. For example, Flagstaff’s factory is currently trying out “cobots.” These robots automatically collect samples at various points in the food production process to conduct quality checks and ensure overall control.

Advice to Other Employers

When asked what advice Martinez would offer to other businesses, his focus returns to the workers. “Be aware of the workforce,” Martinez says. For him it is critical to a company’s success to learn about and meet employee needs, to provide appropriate training, and to give employees ownership over the work they are an essential part of.

1. Megna, Michelle, “Pet Ownership Statistics 2023,” Forbes Advisor, September 7, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/advisor/pet-insurance/pet-ownership-statistics/#:~:text=The%20population%20of%20pet%20dogs,60.2%20million%20and%2061.9%20million

Helping Community Members Find Independence and Employment

If you’re in the business community in Flagstaff, you may think of Quality Connections as “QC Office,” a local toner and office supply seller that employs people with disabilities, but office supplies are just one branch of this non-profit organization’s many interconnected programs that help the members of our community become more independent.

Helping a Friend Achieve a Dream

When Armando Bernasconi, co-founder and CEO of Quality Connections, was a college student at NAU, he worked as an aide to his college roommate, Ben Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe had cerebral palsy, and although he was an intelligent and driven individual, he required total assistance with all his physical needs such as using the bathroom, bathing, eating, and taking medication. During the day while Sutcliffe attended classes, day time aides would help with his needs, then in the evening Bernasconi would take over. As Bernasconi describes it, “We would have dinner, hang out, go to the bar—you know—whatever college students did.” After college, Bernasconi and Sutcliffe continued to live as housemates together with Bernasconi’s wife, Melissa Bernasconi, who served as Quality Connections’s CEO for the first 10 years.

There were two things Sutcliffe wanted from his life: a girlfriend and a job. “We put him in situations where he was able to find a girlfriend,” Bernasconi explains, “but the job was really the accomplishment that I am most proud of, because that is the origins of QC Office.” Armando and Melissa were serving clients with disabilities out of their garage when they learned of a program in the eastern U.S. wherein individuals with disabilities were given an opportunity to work collecting, refurbishing, and reselling used toner cartridges. They decided to try applying the model here in Flagstaff, and Sutcliffe became their webmaster.

According to Doug Arnett, QC’s Chief Communications Officer, Sutcliffe was able to work as the webmaster by using an augmentative communication device attached to his wheelchair and controlled by his chin. He was only able to choose between yes and no, so the process was very slow and tedious, but he was able to use it to upload images and other information to the website, and most importantly, to “achieve his dream of working.” Arnett says that when the Bernasconis realized they could help someone like Sutcliffe, who had such profound limitations, they realized that they could help anybody, and so Quality Connections grew and expanded to reach more people.

Diverse Community Services

Today, Quality Connections has six departments to help individuals with different needs gain more independence: group home services, in-home services, a Montessori-based adult day program, employment services, Evergreen Academy Preschool, and QC Office. Members may rely on Quality Connections to help them develop independent living skills for residential settings through the group home and in-home programs, to learn vocational skills and address barriers to employment in the day program and employment services program, or to provide opportunities for group-supported or individual employment through the organization’s social enterprises (QC Office and Evergreen Academy Preschool) or through other community partner businesses.

Each person’s needs are unique, so it’s rare that an individual member will progress through every department, but Quality Connections has developed its programs in such a way that each one addresses the next potential barrier a member might come up against on their journey toward increased independence. For example, a person in the day program might develop their vocational skills, then participate in group-supported employment, then find individual job placement in a business in the community. For Arnett, it’s this innovative approach that drew him to the organization: “There’s other people doing group homes out there. There’s other people doing day programs. There’s other people doing employment programs. But QC has created this sort of continuum that really ties them all together in a way that’s just more effective.”

Serving Adults with Disabilities and Other Barriers to Employment

Last year, Quality Connections served 333 people across all six of their departments, with clients falling into two major groups. The first includes people with intellectual or developmental disabilities such as autism, cerebral palsy, or epilepsy, who are typically served through the residential programs, day program, and group-supported employment. The second group is broader than the first, including anyone with a barrier to employment such as homelessness, a history of substance abuse, a learning disability, or even just a lack of employment history. These members’ needs are addressed through individual employment counseling as well as providing direct aid or connecting members with other community services that can help them tackle the barriers that have kept them from finding stable employment.

Removing Barriers to Organizational Success

Just as Quality Connections works to help its members remove barriers and find greater independence, so, too, its leadership must find creative ways to tackle the many barriers in the organization’s path. On the wall of the organization’s conference room is a visual depiction of its strategic plan (a few years old now) with a canyon depicting its greatest challenges, a bridge representing strategies to tackle them, and some of the organization’s aspirations on the other side.

Already, one can see some of the aspirations becoming reality, as the preschool that was a mere dream when this plan was drawn became Evergreen Academy Preschool, which opened in 2022 and served 90 children, while simultaneously providing an employment opportunity for Quality Connections members. Some of the other dreams Quality Connections leaders hope to someday realize include owning their own space that can meet all the needs of their varied programs, having a farm program that members can participate in, and getting their member-run digital radio station, “Route 66 The Ghost” on the FM dial.

As with any non-profit, one of the greater challenges Quality Connections must continuously work to address is its expenses. While the organization does receive state funding, the state’s rate increases do not keep up with Flagstaff’s minimum wage. Fortunately, the donations received from its generous supporters, grants, and revenues generated by QC Office and Evergreen Academy Preschool have been sufficient to make those endeavors self-supporting and subsidize employee wages to ensure that Quality Connections is able to pay its employees above minimum wage. (Though both Arnett and Bernasconi note that the value of these social enterprises lies more in the training opportunities for members and the community connections they foster than in the revenues they generate.)

Quality Connections is also working to make the organization more “employee-centric,” by offering better benefits, revamping company materials (like the employee handbook) to be more “human,” and just treating its employees like people. Bernasconi explains, “If our employees want to be here—if they’re happy here—then we’ll keep them longer, which means our turnover won’t be as expensive, which means that we’re going to have longer term employees providing a better service.” Beyond having a very low turnover rate, Quality Connections’s employee focus has helped them attract the kind of staff who are enthusiastic about identifying the community’s needs and building and growing programs to fill in the voids.

Community Support in Flagstaff

Although Flagstaff can be a very challenging place to run this sort of organization from an expense standpoint, the trade off for that is a truly exceptional amount of community support. “Flagstaff businesses are probably the most incredible group of people to be partnered with,” Bernasconi says, “and we have dozens of partnerships all throughout the city.” Local businesses partner with Quality Connections to provide job placement opportunities for its members, but even non-partner businesses—including Coconino County, the City of Flagstaff, FUSD, and Northern Arizona University—purchase office supplies and provide support to the organization.

Arnett compares that to the response in the Phoenix community:

“We’ve been trying to dip our toes into the Phoenix market with QC Office for years, and it’s just a different beast down there. The community as a whole just doesn’t respond the same way that they do here in Flagstaff to the mission of helping people with disabilities, to the environmental message of recycling your toner cartridges… They just don’t care as much.”

The environmental message Arnett is referring to earned the organization the Chamber of Commerce’s “Green Business Award” in 2023. That’s because QC Office’s toner cartridge recycling program does more than help people with disabilities in the community. It also substantially reduces community landfill contributions by pulling toner cartridges and electronic waste out of the waste stream and recycling them back into useful products. Along the way, it creates half a dozen jobs for people in the community.

For Arnett, this recycling program functions as a great metaphor for the whole organization. “In many ways people with disabilities at one time were thought of… as something that could just be discarded,” he explains, “but, in fact, with training, with the right opportunity, everybody has something of value to offer to our community.”

Successes Keep QC Going

Both Bernasconi and Arnett are bolstered to keep working through challenges by the successes they have seen. Arnett notes that, “When you focus and look creatively, there are ways to get around these barriers, as challenging as they may seem at times…You get up and you do your best every day.” Meanwhile, Bernasconi focuses on the positive outcomes: “We’ve been at it for 25 years, and it’s been working.” With thousands of members served, tons of landfill waste diverted, and unquantifiable ripples made by helping people turn their lives around and then give back, the impact Quality Connections has had on the Flagstaff community over those 25 years simply cannot be overstated.

Quality Connections

Thriving in Business by Focusing on Community Need

When Jabarha Nichols, affectionately called “Kutt” by those in the know, learned that barbers were going extinct in his hometown, he made it his mission to learn the trade, teach it to others, and help his community in the process. These days Nichols is head of Kuttz, a local barbery empire that includes Eastside and Westside barber shops, a barber college, a beauty college, and a barber supply shop. He’s also had a hand in training more than 50 barbers through his college, many of whom have stayed in Flagstaff or the surrounding area to set up their own shops.

Nichols’s aspirations extend far beyond just bringing barbers back to Flagstaff, though. He is truly committed to using all the resources he can to provide services and opportunities for the local community. Presently, Nichols and his staff are working through the process of getting accreditation for his colleges through the National Accrediting Commission of Career Arts and Sciences (NACCAS), which would allow students to tap into loan and grant money designated for higher education, including Federal Pell Grants. He is also planning to add a daycare to his list of businesses, eliminating for his students and employees the obstacle of finding childcare—one that keeps many parents from pursuing education or maintaining stable employment

Overcoming Challenges

As an adolescent Nichols was a hardworking athlete, but he struggled with academics, and graduated from high school with almost no reading skills. When he found himself ill-equipped for college he, like many others he knew, tried his hand at selling drugs. Nichols never felt right about distributing drugs through his community, though, and ultimately found work at a local gas station. There, he applied the same work ethic he used in high school athletics to move up the ranks. “I worked hard on the field. I can work hard in the job setting,” he told himself. That hard work paid off when Nichols became manager of the store, a position which he held for 7 years.

Nichols’s interest in becoming a barber began when he read an article in Flagstaff Live lamenting the decline of barbers in Flagstaff. At that time, there were only a handful, and most of those were on the verge of retiring. Still, Nichols wasn’t ready to change his lifestyle right away, or as he puts it, “I was getting DUIs, I was getting assault charges, I was still messing up…”

It wasn’t until Nichols narrowly escaped a prison sentence when a third DUI charge against him was unexpectedly dropped amid allegations of misconduct by his arresting officer that he finally took his first steps toward becoming a barber. “I got chills, ‘cause that changed my life,” he explains of the dropped charge. With the support of his boss at the gas station, Nichols moved to Phoenix the very next day to live with his grandmother and attend barber school near her house.

From Flagstaff Barber Shop to Flagstaff Barber College

Upon graduating barber school, Nichols returned to Flagstaff and opened up Kuttz Barber Shop on 6th Avenue. There he worked 7 days a week, offering haircuts for seven dollars apiece. Each year as Nichols became more experienced, he was able to charge a little more per cut and increase his annual income. He also learned how to refine his craft using different tools and techniques, and eventually was able to complete some haircuts in as little as 15 minutes.

As the only young barber in town—and the only one who knew how to cut the newer styles—Nichols never struggled for clients. After 10 years of serving customers all by himself he knew he needed help, but Flagstaff still had the same problem: there were no barbers here. Nichols decided that he needed to become a licensed barber instructor.

Nichols prepared, paid the $200 fee, traveled to Phoenix, took the instructor’s exam, and failed. He continued studying, taking, and ultimately failing the exam every three months for five more exam cycles. Finally, after his sixth attempt, Sam Labarbera, Chairman of the Arizona State Board of Barbers, reached out to Nichols personally, and asked if he could return to Phoenix. As a former educator, Labarbera recognized that “some people just can’t take tests on paper.” He asked Nichols the exam questions verbally and found Nichols’s answers to be satisfactory. Finally, Nichols’s hard work paid off and he was granted an instructor’s license.

A Bigger Location and A Beauty College

Nichols opened Kuttz Barber College in 2015, and immediately overcrowded his shop with students: “I had like ten students, right, and the facility could only fit, legally, five students… I’m talking about chairs was bumping into each other.” Nichols put out feelers and, through local contacts, was eventually able to find a bigger space—three adjacent units in a shopping center on 7th Avenue. In the first two, he put his barber shop and barber college, but he wasn’t initially sure what to do with the third.

As Nichols contemplated putting an ice cream shop beside his barbery businesses, the COVID 19 pandemic hit and dealt a death blow to the only local beauty school. As soon as he heard, Nichols knew what that third space was meant to be. He took all the pandemic relief money he was able to get and invested it into Kuttz Beauty School. Nichols claims he thought it was the end of the world, but still he “wanted to make sure [he] didn’t mess that money up.”

Going from operating a barber school and shop out of a 550 square foot space to a 4,000 square foot space has made a huge difference to the Kuttz business model. For one thing, Nichols now has an opportunity to employ staff members—5 in all including instructors and office management. He is also able to offer an eight month barber training course that includes a substantial amount of hands-on experience for his students (something Nichols felt was lacking in his initial training), and then provide employment to the professionals he graduates.

Changing Lives in His Community

For Nichols, pursuing the trade of barbery changed his life, and he is grateful to be able to offer that opportunity to others. After recounting a past that included illegal activity, homelessness, and financial struggles, Nichols explains, “Now I’m able to take care of my people, my kids, and then share this experience with these guys… Now they’re taking care of their families. It’s just crazy the difference I made from somebody that couldn’t even read.”

Students at Kuttz Barber College learn more than just how to cut hair. With Nichols’s support, they learn customer service, how to be good conversationalists, and in some cases how to make better life choices. Nichols recounts stories about helping a student who spent years in prison learn different nuances of interaction than he became accustomed to while incarcerated and about showing up to a student’s parole hearing to lend support when it seemed no one else would. Now with his moves toward accreditation and opening a daycare, Nichols is using his business to create more opportunities for people to learn a trade that can help them succeed.

Making Business Work

For those thinking about starting their own businesses or pursuing other types of dreams, Nichols is bursting with advice. He says, “If you’ve got a dream or you’ve got something you think can work, you’ve got to go out there and try to make it work.” Nichols is especially enthusiastic about people providing what is needed where it’s needed, as he did with barber services in Flagstaff.

As for how to “make it work,” Nichols has a couple tips that helped him along the way. First, he advises doing things right: “Once I started doing the legal stuff and kept legal, stuff started happening for me. Doors started opening for me. People started helping me more.” Second, Nichols recommends asking for help. He notes that “a lot of people are scared to ask questions,” including him while he was struggling through school. It was when he started asking questions and getting help that “things really turned around” for him.

Through a lot of hard work, Nichols has figured out how to make the Kuttz model thrive in Flagstaff. Although he can’t predict the future of the business, Nichols has begun to consider his model’s national potential and how Kuttz might be able to meet the needs of communities beyond his hometown.

https://www.kuttzbarbershop.com

Using Local, Authentic Connections to Compete in a BIG Market

For an occasional camper or party host, pretty much any plastic box that can hold ice might be sufficient to meet one’s food and drink cooling needs, but for an outdoor enthusiast who spends more time away from modern conveniences, a higher caliber cooler starts to look more like a necessity. As a small, Flagstaff-based business, one might think Canyon Coolers would struggle to compete against the giants in the cooler manufacturing market, but majority owner Jason Reed Costello actually credits the company’s success to those very factors: “There seems to be room in the marketplace for this kind of happy, kind of funky, boutique cooler manufacturer competing against billion dollar brands.”

Over the last 11 years, the company’s unique designs have gained a foothold among high end cooler users in the Mountain West where activities like hunting, fishing, whitewater rafting, and camping are common pastimes. Participants in these activities who want to support small, local gear manufacturers, turn to Canyon Coolers. The high quality product, great customer service, and lifetime warranty have led Canyon to grow a base of loyal customers, many of whom own multiple of the company’s coolers and other items. These days, about 23,000 coolers pass through the Canyon Coolers warehouse each year.

Getting into the Business of Coolers

Costello’s entry into the cooler business came when a different cooler sales opportunity he invested in turned south. Left with stock he needed to sell off, he began the Canyon Coolers name and website. After finding some initial success, Costello decided to see the cooler business through, and eventually began customizing his design to meet the needs of his clientele who, at the time, were whitewater rafters.

A recreational rafter himself, Costello talked with his industry connections in outfitter and gear seller circles to find out what folks were really looking for from these products. After filtering through a lot of conflicting information, Costello landed on a design that satisfied about 80% of the requests he was given. One notable change Costello made was to scale down his product to make it a better fit for a wider audience of western rafters, most of whom use smaller boats than his initial group of primarily Grand Canyon rafters.

After establishing enough credibility in the rafting market, Canyon Coolers set its sights on western hunters. According to Costello, “Western-style rafting is an expedition, and there are some parallels to those hunters who go out for weeks on end or have to move a lot of meat without it going bad.” Despite these audiences seeming very different on the surface, when it comes to coolers, their needs are quite similar. Costello found support among hunting and conservation organizations in Arizona, and was able to expand into that market. As the company grew, the market broadened to include everyone who spends time outdoors. For Costello, “the neat thing about [the cooler business] is you’re really tied to people’s passions.”

The Authenticity and People of Flagstaff

Being in the high end cooler business in Flagstaff has turned out to be a real asset for Canyon Coolers. Easy access to the outdoors and the people who love them provides the company a boost to everything from marketing to staffing. “I think it lends our brand an authenticity that it wouldn’t have in Phoenix,” Costello explains, noting that when he needs to, he can take a cooler outside, walk a few feet, and take a great picture with it in the same kind of environment where his customers might use it.

Costello has also found that his employees choose to work at Canyon Coolers specifically because of its ties to the outdoor industry, which leads to less turnover: “I think us being in that outdoor space helps us because everyone here is into the outdoors. Whereas if I hire a guy off the street to work in my warehouse in Phoenix he’ll go to the warehouse next door for 25 cents more, the guy here wouldn’t do it because the warehouse next door isn’t an outdoors company.”

In fact, Costello has had overall good experiences with the people of Flagstaff, be they NAU engineering students contributing to the business through their capstone projects, business resource providers like the folks at NACET (now Moonshot), or just the people he does business with in town. Costello explains that he values building strong relationships with those people over the bottom line: “When it comes to business, it isn’t always about getting the very best pricing. It’s about having people that you can rely on around you… Knowing that I can rely on the guy, and that whether he likes me or not, he’s gonna run into me in the supermarket or a restaurant or something—I think that helps hold us all accountable.”

Drinkware and Local Artists

Apart from their coolers and cooler accessories, Canyon Coolers has also dipped into the drinkware market. Costello confides that he hasn’t contributed much in terms of innovation to the drinkware world, but rather that he got into selling drinkware as a way to offset the costs of “shipping empty boxes all over the country if not the world.” The business started out offering a copper-plated cup in homage to its “Copper State” origins, before adding a few other colors to the mix. More recently, though, Canyon Coolers has found a way to use drinkware to underscore the local feel of its brand: partnering with local artists.

The first two partners in the drinkware “artist series” are based out of Northern Arizona: Ashley Matelski, a Flagstaff resident whose pieces feature desert botanical designs, and Duane Koyawena, a Hopi-Tewa member whose work is a modern take on traditional Hopi pottery. Additional drinkware designs are currently being developed by Flagstaff-based graphic designer, Rod Cooley, whose work draws on his love for the outdoors and his Native American culture, and graphic designer and illustrator, Rachel Jung (Rayco Design), out of Southern Utah whose work reflects her self-described “adventure addict” nature. Costello hopes to have the two new designs available by the 3rd or 4th quarter of this year.

Costello seems to enjoy the challenge involved in finding the right artists to partner with for their drinkware. He explains, “It’s funny… because we have to think bigger than Flag to do it, but you have to be authentic, too.” It’s this focus on authenticity in all aspects of his business that has really helped Canyon Coolers compete by drawing in local community supporters, whether they are residents in Flagstaff carrying their artist series cups around town, or rafters in Oregon giving online feedback on what they’d like to see in the next generation of cooler.

Mistakes, Lessons, and Advice for Flagstaff Businesses

When Costello started Canyon Coolers, he knew a lot about building relationships but almost nothing about building a brand. He describes the early stage of the business as one in which he just tried to survive long enough to figure things out. As he puts it, “We made a lot of mistakes, and we tried to make them quick and own them and then move on.”

Some things he learned along the way include understanding the importance of cash flow and the high cost of growth, but the biggest lesson for him was learning to say “no” to arrangements that don’t actually benefit the business. In his case, being wary of the contracts offered by big box retailers and turning them down if they are not actually profitable has been pivotal to keeping Canyon Coolers thriving.

Overall, Costello recommends Flagstaff to other business owners. He says, “Flagstaff is a great place to do business,” even though it can be tough, particularly when it comes to hourly wages. For him, the trade off is in a strong workforce: “You do have smart, educated, worldly people here that will work for you for the right reasons, and do things for the right reasons, and I think that’s a lot of what Flagstaff brings to the table.”