— Igor, corruga.expert just hit 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, — says Arnie, our editor-in-chief. — I think you should write something.
— Arnie. Who are these people. We are useless to anyone who has never touched corrugated board with their own hands. I don’t believe strangers exist who hear the words corrugated board and feel their pulse pick up.
— They’re not strangers, he says. Twenty percent, roughly, own or run plants. The rest: engineers, technologists, equipment salesmen, managers, designers, paper makers. If there’s a random one in the mix, it’s someone who thinks corrugated board is a gift from heaven to mankind.
Something surfaced. My childhood. Helping my grandfather run the family business.
My grandfather Mykhailo had a scrap-paper collection point in the center of Lviv. I tied bundles. Stacked them. Pulled the corrugated board out from the magazines. Loaded the blue van that hauled the paper to the warehouse, then to the mill in Zhydachiv, sometimes to Kyiv.
That whole childhood, and later as a student, my grandfather was my paycheck.
One day someone hauled in ten kilos of old vintage writing paper. Austrian, probably. Nobody made paper like that anymore.
Flawlessly smooth. Yellowed at the edges. Beautiful in a way that hurt a little. Like parchment. I took it home, grabbed an ink pen with a real nib, and started writing. Science fiction. Space travel. My classmates as the heroes. I drew on that paper with the pen nib. There was so much of it, it felt bottomless. A few thousand sheets.
Writing on paper became the thing I loved most. I was struck by a simple, dangerous idea: you could stack ordinary words into something and get paid for it. Get famous for it. Like Mark Twain.
The scrap point was a strange place. People threw out books that belong in museums now. Archives. Old magazines. Documents. Entire histories. Garbage, to them. Treasure, to me.
In 1999, with a partner, I launched my first magazine. Paper and Life.
In university I studied niche magazines. I saw how many gaps still sat open in our market compared to the West. We built a publishing house. In 2003 we gave birth to a magazine about corrugated board — Russian-language, for the fifteen countries of the former Soviet Union, aimed at the narrowest possible niche. We were based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Our biggest readership was in Russia. From issue one, we had an advertiser: BOBST. Probably a mistake on their part — equipment manufacturers don’t usually advertise in brand-new magazines. They made the mistake. We were born from it. BOBST’s ad campaign in our magazine never stopped after that.
Others followed. Twenty-three years passed. Some of them are still with us. I’m grateful to every one.
A few years in, Michael Brunton invited me to Andover and became my great teacher, my mentor, for good. For a while we were the partner publication of Brunton Publications across the former Soviet market, trading content back and forth.
In Russian and in Ukrainian, corrugated comes out sounding like gofra. Or gopher. Taking that international as “Gopher” — I got scared people would think we sold rodents, not board. So Corruga was born instead. Like Tortuga, the pirate island from Pirates of the Caribbean. The association felt obvious to me. A closed circle of chosen cutthroats. Cutters of corrugated board, more precisely.
We never planned to go global.
Then one beautiful night, Calibers and Iskanders landed on Kyiv. Kinzhals and Onyxes. Shaheds and Oreshniks. It was supposed to end in three days with a Moscow victory parade through the city. The problem was: Ukrainians, who once gave up nuclear weapons at Washington’s request and under its security guarantees, suddenly understood they weren’t the great pacifists school had taught them to be. Just idiots who’d disarmed themselves. So they started fighting. We learned to tell cruise missiles apart by ear. Su-25s from Su-34s. Kamikaze drones from the prettiest, deepest ballistic strikes. Our Russian and Belarusian readers, our entire business with them, vanished in one hour.
Our office was in Kyiv. Once we caught our breath, we started writing about what was happening to our industry in Ukraine. The DS Smith plants leveled in Luhansk region. Dunapack in Kherson region. The Rohan plant in Kharkiv. People — our readers — who died. Who were wounded. Who survived and rebuilt production anyway.
Part of our own editorial team is at the front today. Holding rifles that aren’t made of corrugated board.
We started writing in English. A few thousand readers showed up on LinkedIn out of nowhere.
That’s how we ended up on the global market. Then we just kept doing the work.
Trade show reports. Interviews. Listening. Writing. Publishing. No paid promotion. No ad budget. Just post after post.
And today Arnie said:
— Igor, we’ve got twenty thousand followers.
That’s our treasure. That’s all we have. Twenty thousand people who build one of the most vital, beautiful industries on earth, every single day — the reason corrugated board reaches every household on the planet.
Twenty thousand people who raised their golden little fingers and hit Like. And Follow.
May your beautiful hands never ache. May they keep making mankind’s divine invention — corrugated board. And every once in a while, may they hit Like on us.
Thank you. I love you all.
corruga.expert
