Dear Friends,
I begin this letter to you with a deep sense of gratitude for the support you have all provided this company. I was sitting in my office the other night after a particularly long and difficult day, and was struck by a simple piece of paper I had left there. On it was a copy of our purchase order for leather this year, and as I picked it up I was struck by a simple thought. "My how far we have come."
In the summer of 2019 I sat in the office of a local leather tannery nervously picking through some samples on the desk while I waited to speak to the company rep. He came in and we talked for a little while about the leather I wanted, and then came the real question. What is your minimum order quantity? The answer hit me hard, but I maintained my composure. At the time, their minimum was about three months worth of our normal inventory. On top of that the total cost per unit with our third party cutting company would mean that we wouldn't really get much of a lower price than what we had been paying for individual pieces from our Missouri supplier.
Here I am now, just a few years later, and the order we put in for the months of November and December this year was about 5 times what that minimum order quantity was back in 2019. Honestly, putting that order in required about as much faith as the first time we ordered in 2019.
Buying inventory for Christmas is a bit like predicting the day to day trends of the stock market. It feels like there should be a good way to turn it into a formula and order what you need based off that. In reality, the way that the Christmas season progresses is all over the map with very little consistency.
Something that happened this week that made this issue worse was our email from a few days ago (11/13). We have had a few people in passing mention that they are "waiting until Black Friday to order from us," so I felt the need to clarify how we do our Black Friday Cyber Monday deals. I wrote out an email (which I was pretty proud of design wise) that clarified that the deal we have going on now with our Bogo Sale is all we are doing for BFCM since we don't want people to wait. Since everything is handmade, its critical for us to move as much of the Christmas rush as early as possible to help minimize the crazy last minute spike and thus we don't wait on launching our deals.
The email went out without a hitch, but a few minutes after the email went out, a customer informed us of a problem. A minute later we were able to confirm our fears. Shopify was having outages. Our website was completely unavailable and there was nothing to do but watch as that email continued to burn through its opens.
A similar email we had sent the week prior had a lower open rate and a lower click rate, and it did thousands in sales. This email... less than $500.
It was a frustrating low point in the week. I can't help but think that for some of those people, that was our shot.
The more rational side of me is able to see that a single email with a link that leads to a down page shouldn't really impact a customer's likelihood to buy a product like ours. People who live in our modern world are used to technology breaking occasionally and have some grace around it. I hope that part of me is right.
It isn't all bad news from the front lines though. We have been clawing our way back towards caught up (despite some annoying and persistent supply issues), and there was enough time freed up for me to get another one of our engravers back online and calibrated. That means we are now up to 4 of our intended 6 that our operational.
I want to talk more about one of the specific parts that we have been having trouble getting reliably for years now that is once again rearing its ugly head, but I might have to save that story for next week. It has the potential to spawn a whole new frontier for us (with all the headaches that go with it), and I am hopeful this could lead to better and brighter things. Anyway, I'll save that for a later letter.
Stay tuned for more of these letters in the future!
Ever your servant,
Colin Murdy
CEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
