How Dropbox helped Missouri Star Quilt Co. bring a dying town back to life

When the Doan family moved to Hamilton, Missouri in 1995, they had no idea they would eventually build what some people now call the “Disneyland of quilting.” Missouri Star Quilt Co. went from just one building, one quilt machine, and one Dropbox folder to 15 quilt shops, 400 employees, and 100,000 visitors a year.

Alan Doan, co-founder, gives much credit to Dropbox for the growth of their business. “In the beginning, everything went through the Dropbox folder that was Missouri Star,” says Alan. “We got so much lift out of that for building our company.”

In the very early stages, Alan was in Toronto and the rest of his family was in Missouri, so every picture of a product, every daily deal description, and every detail of inventory planning went through Dropbox. It allowed Alan to travel and move around while still growing the company quickly. “When we added team members, there was already a place and a flow for this stuff to live,” he says. “Everything was there and it had a trail. And we built our whole company around it.”

A few years ago, the Doans launched BLOCK Magazine, a popular product amongst their customers, which features quilting patterns, tips and tricks, and stories from readers. They relied on Dropbox to save and share large, raw image and graphics files. It allowed people across different teams, including article writers, tutorial writers, and photographers to all have access and provide input on the files. 

“It all happens right in there, which made it so much easier for us,” says Alan. “We got to just focus on the work that needed to be done and not, ‘Hey, did you get my file? Hey, refresh this one. No, you're looking at an old version.’ There's none of that that we ever ran into.”

Watch the video for the full story on how Missouri Star got to where they are now.