The first seeds for Social Imprints were planted in 1999, when Jeff Sheinbein, our CEO, was executive director of AI, a non-profit printing company that hired recovering drug addicts and the formerly homeless.

Jeff advertised for an admin assistant, and several days later a shy young man walked in the door and introduced himself as Kevin McCracken. Kevin said he'd been referred by a counselor at Walden House, a well-known Bay Area drug rehab and treatment center.

Jeff liked Kevin right away. Soon Kevin was answering phones, filing paperwork, and performing other office duties. His energy and enthusiasm were immediately apparent, and he was soon promoted to sales manager. In 2004, Kevin became executive director, taking over while Jeff helped kick-start a social-based, non-profit printing company in London, England.

SI is born. In 2008, Jeff and Kevin joined forces again to start the company of their dreams.

Jeff recalls, “We wanted to create a different kind of printing company, one that would offer high-quality promotional products and outstanding customer service, while providing maximum social returns to the community.”

In 2009, just before Social Imprints opened, the company was selected from thousands of applicants to present its business plan to the Investors Circle Conference.

The Investors Circle members invite the country’s most promising social enterprises to present their business plans to an investment group that includes some of the country’s most prominent investment funds and angel investors.

Follow-up: Two of the Investors Circle members separately praised the Social Imprints business plan as among the clearest and most inspiring they’d seen. SI received generous funding.

SI has built a reputation as the “go to” printer for many of the Silicon Valley elite such as Dropbox, Pinterest, Hearsay, Giant Bomb, Practice Fusion,Venmo, Square, Weebly, Clearslide & Lyft. SI was named the official “Merchandise Provider” for the Crunchies (Academy Awards of the tech industry).

• - Official Printer for the 7th Annual “Crunchies” Awards (the tech industry’s Oscars, hosted by TechCrunch).
• - Social Imprints created merchandising plans that generated over $7.3 M in sales for some of the nation’s top brands , including Google, Dropbox, Pinterest, Lyft, CBS Interactive, and Airbnb.
• - Moved to a new 10,000-sq.-ft. facility in San Francisco’s SOMA high-tech district.
• - Began hosting “studio nights” – print parties where organizations can come and learn how to print t-shirts.
• - Hosted an Emerging Leaders of Pakistan workshop to help international visitors learn about social enterprise best practices.
• - Hired six new mission employees.
• - Launched internal webstores for AOL, Lyft, and Airbnb.