Forever, Made Simple: Southtree

We are led by the desire to find simple technology and design-driven ways to reconnect people with things that matter most but are being lost or overlooked.

In college, needing some extra cash to buy a first generation iPhone, a partnership was formed that would take a small business model and give it wings, driven by design-thinking and intentional system building that would lay the foundation for what is now one of the largest consumer preservation operations in the country.

Southtree was founded on the conviction to restore - to revalue what has been devalued. At a surface level, Southtree is about preserving outdated memories - tapes, film, photos, and audio - into digital keepsakes that are both usable and safe for future generations.

Southtree: Preserve your recorded moments digitally

You can imagine the kind of responses we receive from people when they watch their memories unseen for decades or see the faces of their loved ones who are no longer with them.

Memories so meaningful demand a meaningful response. We're meticulous about doing things well. This has set us apart from competitors who have warehouses staffed with cheap labor (or outsourced overseas) and slap people's treasured memories on cold racks, rather than handling them with care. And it shows.

From the high-tech systems that enable us to preserve over five-thousand home movies each day (safely, with real-time updates every time an order moves, driven by an advanced barcode system) to our beautiful Southtree Collection boxes.

Our attention and focus have created a workplace, atmosphere, and company culture that attracts incredibly talented, hard-working people who want to be a part of meaningful work, beautifully accomplished.

We are about people, sustainability, and community

We have three lived priorities, of which the first is people. We care about our customers and our team by investing in them both. The second is sustainability. We responsibly source every material we use, and in an age of debt and leverage, we seek fiscal responsibility. Lastly, we care about the community. We're an active part of our city's downtown renewal, and we give back globally through our partnership with BuildACity.org.

We're the company that cares about the work we do and the people we impact. Since our inception, we've been focused on the needs of our customers and meeting them where they are. We don't toss around technical terms to look impressive or exist on social media because we have to - we talk simply so we all understand and we love social media because that's where we meet you, our customer.

From 2013 to 2016, we've had a 1,150% increase, earning us the top spot in Inc. Magazine's top fastest growing company. We were also #7 in Inc. Magazine's consumer products category and the 2nd fastest growing company in the state of Tennessee. Southtree has grown from a small start-up team to a staff of 130. We've harnessed the technology and put together a team that has created over 3 million DVDs, and we're racing towards 4 million. It's people that have made the difference, from our customers to team members, and were filled with anxious excitement to continue delivering products and services that reconnect people in our ever digital world.

Three steps to memory lane

Send: We’ll provide you with a barcoded order sheet (to keep your memories safe and sorted!).

Digitize: We provide you with personalized updates, from start to finish.

Receive: You’ll receive back your originals plus new digital copies, ready for reviving and sharing.

We understand how important these moments are, so we’ve developed an amazing order tracking system that provides you updates every step of the way. Each and every order and each and every memory is tagged with a unique barcode, ensuring safety. This year we’ll scan barcodes 1.4 million times. Our customer list continues to grow. We’ve completed orders for over thirty–five thousand customers from all fifty states and for some of our friends overseas too. Last year we celebrated the creation of our one-millionth DVD. That’s a lot of memories that we’ve preserved and delivered to customers.

Kudos to the Trailblazers

Nick Macco's love for entrepreneurship began in 4th grade pitching shoe designs to Nike’s Phil Knight and hawking his own comic books (The Adventures of Crouton Man). As a self-taught designer, Nick’s work has been featured by Behance’s 99u and Swiss Miss. Nick’s blood runs green and gold, he’s ridden chairlifts since the age of 4, and he’s made a valiant attempt at surfing off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. In his increasingly limited free time, Nick enjoys reading philosophy and history. Nick lives in Downtown Chattanooga with his beautiful wife Ashley and their twin boys.

Adam Boeselager saved his money in high school and pitched his parents for a business micro-loan when most kids his age were buying cars. Adam noticed his parents aging tape collection, never watched or enjoyed, and realized the need for preserving recorded moments. Armed with a website and a toll-free number that forwarded to his cell phone, Adam answered phone calls in his bedroom and fulfilled orders for customers from across the country. In his fleeting free time, Adam enjoys boating on the Tennessee River, embarking on exotic adventures to New Zealand, Canada, and Cambodia, reading business gurus’ biographies and consuming large quantities of good coffee.

“We have over a decade of experience handling one of a kind memories. We’ve become experts in the art of digitizing old analog formats.”