Meet Kozen Gray of Black Box Underground

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kozen Gray.

Kozen, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I am a graduate from the Pasadena Art Center. Always a social and business minded person, I am always looking for a way to service the Los Angeles community. One common problem I have been seeing nowadays is that more and more businesses are seeing the opportunities presented by owning and maintaining your own online shop.

Compared to a mass online marketplace like eBay, etsy, and amazon a personal online shop gives owners the ability to really customize their brand image and to connect to their customers on another level. As a person who loves startups and fresh approaches to the world, I wanted to help the community of small business owners out by classing up their websites. Many business owners are DIY and logistics heavy and just overall really great at left brain thinking. I wanted bbu.la to help them at least have a level playing field or even get a leg up on the big commercial players through branding and creating aesthetically pleasing and functional web design. In today’s highly connected world owning a beautiful www is like owning a really nice piece of real estate. Invest in it and it will pay dividends.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It’s never a smooth road for a startup. There are a huge number of problems and one of the major ones is finding clients and convincing them of the value that you bring. Why don’t they just create one on squarespace or wix? Well that is always an option, the only difference is the level of customization and brand imagery. If they need something specific or if they want to create a more complicated brand I would always suggest WordPress because you can own all the assets and save it to your backup. With squarespace or shopify, once your website is deactivated a few months later all your work is deleted to create more room for their other customers. With WordPress, you can back up your entire site to your hard drive and re-plan or rebuild. You also have a large number of extra options to build a more robust website.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with Black Box Underground – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
We are a branding and web presence company. We specialize in creating beautiful and functional websites for people. What sets us apart is our fantastic customer service. We help the business owner with full customization and the other technical aspects of creating a website. Unlike shopify and squarespace where it is mostly DIY. We are catering to business owners who are fantastic at logistics, inventory, and supply chain management and don’t have the know how or the time to create a good website.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
The plans for the future is to continue to grow and expand the business as much as possible through good client relations and superior service.

Pricing:

• $1000 for the basic wordpress website. Good for creating a flexible site for starting businesses.
• $2000 for revamping an existing website. It’s a lot of work to make a mess look refined.
• $3000 for an advanced wordpress website with the works. Includes a handful of professional plugins, inventory uploading, photos, SEO tools, backlinks, and more.

Contact Info:

• Website: bbu.la
• Phone: 626 541 2837
• Email: blackboxunderground@gmail.com

Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.