After six months of conceptualizing, planning, and building, we are excited to announce the launch our new  corporate website (officially dubbed, PureFit 3.0).

PureFit 3.0 is our third–and by far best–website. The design process started in earnest a few months ago with this easy-to-navigate blog, and took off from there. Most notably, we re-engineered our shopping cart to make it more user friendly, and redesigned the rest of the site to make it more visually appealing. Even though you see one site when you visit PureFit.com, I like to think of it as three distinct sites:

• PureFit.com provides you with everything you need to know about choosing the right nutrition bar, how to purchase our award-winning nutrition bars, and why we do what we do.
• PureFitBlog.com provides up-to-date info on nutrition, what we are working on, and a plethora of cool and behind-the-scenes stuff that makes us tick (and laugh).
• PureFit.com/Store allows you to buy award-winning PureFit bars and clothing using our new state-of-the-art shopping cart.

We also worked closely these past few months with our good friend and the world’s leading authority on stretching, flexibility, and injury prevention—Kinesiologist, Brian Dorfman—to improve his site, BrianDorfman.com. Brian’s site is the place to go to learn more about simple exercises that can and will improve the quality of your life.

Please look around the new PureFit.com and let us know what you think (you can email me at robb at purefit dot com, or you can leave a comment below).

Today I would like to take a moment to sincerely thank everyone who makes PureFit the great company that it is. Needless to say, without our committed following of customers–those of you who actually buy and consume our award-winning, all natural nutrition bars–we wouldn’t be in business, but our team, which is made up of a very diverse and unique group of professionals who flat-out just make everything magically happen, also deserves a major pat on the back.

First and foremost, I want to thank Jenna Brien, our enthusiastic in-house sales associate. For those of you who have had the pleasure of meeting Jenna, you know she’s a ball of energy whose true passion in life is teaching spin and being around her husband Will. Jenna and I laugh so much together that our office manger, Belinda Jordan, said we’d sell an additional million bars if we’d simply quit goofing off so much. From that moment on, I realized that Belinda, a 20-year-old college student, was the smartest employee I had! The problem is, she laughs at all of my jokes and impersonations, and that of course only fuels my antics. Regardless, Belinda’s a real gem and things just wouldn’t work around here with her.

This post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Darcy Pendarvis. Darcy could be the CFO of a major corporation but prefers to help out Orange County, Calif., companies with their bookkeeping, payroll, and banking/financial strategy. As a QuickBooks Pro Advisor, Darcy is able to provide me with all of the financial info I need at a moments notice. Without her, I know we wouldn’t be around. She has saved me many times and I cannot thank her enough.

Christian Riggs is one of our freelance graphic designers. He’s outrageously under-priced, lives in Utah with his wife Amy and their four gorgeous kids, and is one wickedly cool guy. Check out his work at www.riggscreative.com. Christian is responsible for our new logo and packaging (thanks to Becky Nelson for giving us the original concept), and he also does a great job on our print ads, eNewsletters, and many of the other collateral materials that keep us in business. Thanks, Christian!

No one laughs more at me or my jokes than my publicist/business consultant, Stan (last name withheld for fear that he’d come to my home and waterboard me for getting his name indexed by Google or some other search engine). Stan’s more than just my publicist and business consultant… he’s a true friend and a brilliant business tactician. Thanks, Stan!

Here at PureFit, we work with so many nutritionists and Celiac specialists that it’s hard to thank them all. Nevertheless, I’d like to mention Kim Brown, Danna Korn (author of Gluten-Free Living For Dummies), Dr. Bari Rooney, and Melinda Dennis. Thank you–each and everyone of you–for all of your sage advice and referrals!

Needless to say, if you’ve made it this far in today’s post, you must be wondering who I owe the utmost thanks too, and that of course would be my wife Traci, who in 2000 encouraged me to “go for it.” She allowed me to take what little money we had and start PureFit, and now, some eight years later, we’re still here, kicking the nutrition bar industry’s butt. Thanks, Traci… you truly are the best!

Thanks to everyone else who make us great (and yes, that includes you Kilee, and you too Pikachu… the two of you may act like dogs, eat dog food, beg for treats and table scraps, and even walk around the office on all fours, but I know that you know that I know that you guys can read!)

I’m Robb Dorf, founder and CEO of PureFit. PureFit is truly a product of my own personal passion for living a healthy lifestyle rooted in fitness and good nutrition. As a student, I studied exercise physiology, and I followed my studies with more than a decade of experience in the health and nutrition industry. Fitness and nutrition is more than just head-knowledge for me. It’s also more than just a business proposition.

I am an athlete who, like anyone who has had the satisfaction of achieving personal goals, is proud of my own athletic accomplishments. More importantly for my customers, however, the first-hand knowledge I have gained in the process of training and competition has been invaluable in my pursuit of the ideal nutrition bar.

PureFit is, for me and my team, truly a way of life. We are constantly aware of how much misinformation is out there when it comes to nutrition and fitness. Educating people on what it takes to achieve maximum health and fitness is as much a part of what we do at PureFit as deciding what ingredients should go into our next nutrition bar.

My vision has always been to take a holistic approach to one’s health, and like I’ve always said, I like to keep it simple. Life is too short to not do what you enjoy, and regular exercise and good nutrition make doing what you enjoy even more enjoyable.

Welcome (and finally) to the PureFit Blog. I know, I know…we’re a bit behind the times with launching a blog, but it’s only because we’ve been so busy over the past seven years pursuing the best nutrition bar we can make.

Let’s pretend for a moment that we had been blogging since our establishment in July of 2000. If you had been following our blog, you would certainly remember the excitement we shared with you when:

1. We were chosen as Bike Magazine’s Nutrition Bar of the Year in 2004.
2. You would also recall the pride we expressed when we announced we were donating 20,000 PureFit Nutrition Bars to U.S. troops in Iraq through Operation Gratitude in August of 2007.
3. No doubt you would recall our enthusiastic support of the Best Friends Animal Society, Challenged Athletes Foundation, Celiac Sprue Association, and City of Hope.
4. You would have also read about new flavors, new reviews, new packaging, and wider distribution–we would have written about it all.

Many of you know that instead of writing blog entries, we were traveling. You saw us at more than 100 events around the country, but had we been blogging, many more of you would remember our blog entries chronicling the PureFit Team’s relentless travel schedule intended to get our bars into the hands of fitness enthusiasts, athletes, and the people who need them most, like celiacs and diabetics. We are, after all, happiest when we can be face-to-face with any individual committed to good health through nutrition and exercise.

You would of course also remember reading numerous blog entries about the exploits of Kilee and Pikachu (don’t worry, there will be much more to come about these canine PureFit pundits-they really do run the show!) and the rest of the PureFit Team.

In short, if we had been blogging over the past seven years, you would recall seven years worth of stories about bringing the best bar to market. Seven years of blood, sweat and tears in pursuit of the most nutritious energy bar available. Seven years of overwhelming pride in our product (and you would know we’re most proud of what our bars DON’T contain-no dairy, wheat, gluten, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated oils, trans fats or sugar alcohols). Seven years of passion for educating you about how to achieve optimum health and fitness through nutrition and exercise.

In the final equation, while we are a company that makes a very competitive, award-winning product, which has traveled the world with some of the top performing athletes of the 21st century, we are really just people (and two dogs) who care about the well-being of other people (and dogs). That’s where our company began, and that’s what our blog is really all about. It is an opportunity to connect on a more personal level with you, for you are way more than just customers to us.

Welcome to the PureFit Blog-welcome to the PureFit family. The next seven years are going to be incredible.