Dear Friends,
I love field trips. I always have. They are even more fun now that I own a business. My field trips are to places like leather tanneries or machine shops and its always to talk with potential suppliers about their process and how we can work with them. I will say that my field trips are often expensive, leading to me spending thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars buying supplies for the business.
I was able to go on just such a field trip with Meryle (my COO) on Monday and per tradition, it ended with a big purchase. We were able to visit the local showroom of the dealer for the mill we are looking to buy and bring into the workshop to help with bars. This project has taken longer than I wanted, but some things are out of my control. Some of you may recall that I was hoping that we would have the mill operational and producing bars by the end of January, and while thats still possible, its unlikely.
The main issue is that it has been a bit of a dance. First we needed to get my commercial electrician friend out here to confirm that what we actually wanted to do with the power was possible. The machine has specific power requirements and it just something you can plug into the wall, so I needed an expert to confirm we had the power we need. I also wanted to get a quote from him to get the work done so I could have that in mind for budget reasons.
With the snowstorms making travel challenging, and the fact that he isn't close to start with, we had a hard time getting him out here in the beginning of the month so we were already behind the ball. When we did finally get him out here, everything was good to go for getting the power where we needed, but we then needed to confirm that we could get the power in place before the machine arrived so that we could properly test it.
We were able to finish that and then we needed to find a good time to visit the showroom with my machinist friend to allow him time to ask the right questions to confirm this is a good choice for us. So that lead us to this week Tuesday when we were finally able to drive in the sleet and freezing rain down to the showroom.
It was my dream playground...
If someone were to ask me "what would your ideal business be?" I would say that I wanted to own a building filled with every type of manufacturing machine so that I could build anything my mind could imagine. The business person in me however has identified that the only real way to do that is to create businesses that have a genuine use for those machines and can keep them busy most of the time making valuable products... Either that or I win the lottery, which I don't play.
It was very fun for me to wander around the showroom and look at all the various machines this company makes and dream of the various products I would make if I had them. My friend and I asked the many questions we had, and I'm glad we did, because the model we ended up buying was not the one I had planned on. The upgraded model we went with has some differences that on paper appear minor, but in practice make for significantly different results.
So after we got home I got it all squared away with our financing company. The order has now been placed for the mill, and the electrician is installing the new wiring as I write this. Hopefully by early next week we can get it in house and I can work on getting it setup and running shortly thereafter. There is a looming challenge with this plan of course. How do we get this extremely heavy mill into the room through 36" wide doors with just our hands, minds, and basic equipment? But that is a problem for future Colin to solve.
For those that watched the podcast this week about my menu experiments, I have some updates and revisions to tell you about.
After I filmed the podcast, I went to go and get the screenshots of the two options we had running in our test for the thumbnail. As I reviewed the test, something didn't look right. Both options appeared to be displaying the same menu. I emailed my Shoplift (the app that runs our A/B testing) rep and he explained that the menu displayed on the website is actually at the theme level in Shopify and that they were launching a feature in a month or so that would allow for A/B testing of two different themes (rather than two different pages within a theme), but that it wasn't in place yet.
So really I wasn't testing two menus at all.
In reality I was testing the same menu (the one with "Writing/Reading/Bags & Sleeves/Accessories/etc."), but it was just whether the background behind the menu was white, or was the picture. The data was too small for conclusive evidence but the white background behind the menu was leading by a reasonable margin, so I ended the test and started a new test.
My wife had mentioned an idea that was echoed by other people I asked where we put the more "use case" headers at the top, but immediately below the landing image we put the collections split out by type. That way for those browsing they could look at the headers and get inspiration, or if they knew what they were looking for they could go right to those pages. So I launched a new A/B test with our collections section right under that image. In the first few days it is working better than the one that has it lower in the page.
When Shoplift launches their new theme comparison feature we will go back to testing menu's in a proper and scientific way, but for now this will be a good alternative test to run.
Special thanks to everyone who has provided feedback on that podcast episode and submitted ideas for other headers or categories we could use on the website. If any of you missed that episode, please go listen to it. Then let me know what you think we should use for menu headers on the website. It's been hard for me to come up with new ideas since I've been so used to how we have done it in the past.
Stay tuned for more letters on Thursdays in the coming weeks and be sure to go subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you like and watch the videos it helps us get promoted more by the algorithm to people who may never have heard of us.
Ever your servant,
Colin Murdy
CEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
MurdyCreative.Co
