Every bag that we make here at American Paper Bag in Sugar Notch actually has our logo right here at the bottom.

You can see every mailer that was actually made right here in Northeast Pennsylvania.

The technology as far as the equipment we use hasn't changed.

The converting machines, the bag machines that we use, it is a European design.

They're machines that are manufactured in Italy.

Ian, our founder, so he used to work on these machines in Europe.

He brought this concept to the US.

This is something different.

It's innovation in a world that you don't see a lot of innovation.

A lot of it comes back to sustainability.

That's the biggest purpose with moving to a recyclable mailer.

Any waste that we make or any byproducts that we make are all recycled and not sent to any landfill.

Anything that we do, it must be a recyclable avenue.

And I think that's paid off as we brought in customers like Walmart and Amazon and Nike and others.

We also work with Lululemon, Adidas.

A lot of our business is this bag right here.

So this is a paper mailer.

This one in particular is obviously made for Amazon.

And we make three different sizes for Amazon.

But this is a fairly unique mailer.

One thing that makes this very unique is this side right here where it fans out.

It's not a gusset like this where you would see on a normal paper bag on all three sides.

This particularly fits small items.

It will fit wine bottles.

It'll fit food delivery service very well and travel very well.

A lot of times what you'll see, and it's the same with bags, these sides go all the way up to the top and there's a hard corner here.

These corners right here, we go through a die cutting portion of our machine.

So on a lot of bags or a lot of mailers you get, this is a sharp corner.

And what that does is in the manufacturing process, as it runs through conveyors, it actually gets hooked and caught and bags get turned and they can't be handled appropriately.

And it takes extra time and money.

And so this is a significant project we worked on with Amazon to get these corners rounded so that it flows through their facility easier.

It has a seal strip here so that you can get them covered.

This is a 100% recyclable mailer.

So this can go into your recycle stream and it comes back to us as recycled paper.

And then we also do a lot of handled bags.

So things you might see at a liquor store for wine bottles or a food delivery service, when it comes in a paper bag, we make very similar style bags.

We've also gotten into printing the bags, which has shortened our lead time to market.

So if we have a customer that comes in, they want a specific type of bag, we do the R&D on the bag.

And then they say, well, we also want this print.

We want a three or four color print job.

We have the ability to print those jobs here, which will make sure that we get the rolls printed, produced and shipped out faster than if we needed to outsource our print to a third party.

Northeast PA has, I think, a tremendous amount of people that have a great work ethic.

I mean, I think maybe it goes back to the coal mines.

You know, our history in this area being hardworking people, people that are committed to a job that take pride in what they do and how they do it.

And that shows through.

We have a great staff here.

We're pretty centered between Allentown and Scranton, two huge hubs in this area.

And that allows for highly skilled folks from those areas, as well as local talent.

The reason we picked this area to start, Ian did a broad search of areas all over the East Coast to set up the first factory for American Paper Bag.

The proximity to Europe was important because we needed customer service for the machinery.

So we're right by a ton of highways that we can get product to our customers very quickly.

So you see a lot of development happening in this area because of those transit routes.

Wilkes-Barre was kind of the most welcoming.

The chamber was phenomenal.

And they really opened a lot of doors to make this transition to start a business pretty easy.

We started this business in 2018, first customer at the end of 2018.

And I started as the first investor.

Then I became the CEO a couple of years later.

Most days have been great days here because it's a very bright future.

We started this business with one machine.

And I think we were making, you know, a couple hundred thousand mailers and we were ecstatic.

Now we're millions of mailers a day and we don't really see a ceiling to where we can go from here.