Behind the Scenes - 9/26/24

 

Dear Friends,

For those who are new to our emails, I try to do an email once a week where I go into the details of what is happening behind the scenes of our small business. If you want to catch up on prior messages, check out the blog here or just jump right into the story below.

The best part of being small is the ability to try new things. You might think that being big would afford you the budget to do a bunch of wild things, but in reality being big forces you into a box. Customers already have formed opinions and expectations for your company. The unscalability of some ideas means they aren't even attempted. Finally, crazy marketing ideas have more people to shoot them down in big organizations.

However, I can do crazy things and it's been really fun to come up with them.

My latest awesome idea involves our catalog.

Eventually I want to do a big, beautiful catalog with 48 pages that goes into great detail about our products and showcases them in all their lifestyle glory. I'm nowhere near making that happen unfortunately. That type of thing requires a lot of time and effort to setup, and the clock is ticking.

Part of why I want that catalog is technical. 70% or more of our website traffic is on mobile. Now you can only do so much on a tiny screen to showcase a collection of products as beautiful as ours. It leaves very little room for serendipity, that joy of discovering something you weren't looking for exactly, and has the possibility of rendering slightly differently for everyone due to the myriad of devices and browsers.

By contrast, a big beautiful full color, matte finish, perfect bound, heavyweight paper, catalog ensures that everyone sees each thing as intended and in a beautiful, multi-angle context. It also allows you to turn the page and find something amazing you didn't know we carried.

Some of this issue we are working on solving with videos on our new website revision (which I am still hoping to have finished before Christmas), but its still only a ghost of the big catalog at best.

Despite my many wireframe spreads that I have tucked away in my Onyx Leather Folder on my desk, that dream is still aways off. I have instead put together a much smaller and simpler catalog that we have been sending with orders. It is beautiful and contains some of the things I dream about for our larger catalog, but is only a little reflection of what it could be.

However, it's better to try an idea now with what I have rather than to waste the time between now and when that big catalog makes it out of my project folder. So that has given rise to my latest idea.

We are going to mail them the wrong way.

Well it's actually more complex than that (of course). Our printers are able to do a bulk mailing after printing, but we didn't realize how important that would be when we got this first round of catalogs made. We have a lot of catalogs that can't really be mailed the normal media mail way that the USPS uses for printed items like this.

But this provides an opportunity that a big company can't really do.

I am hand addressing our custom blue envelopes, we are sealing them with our silver embossed stamp, and we are mailing the catalogs with samples of the leather to people using old-fashioned stamps.

They really are quite a sight to behold. If you want to experience getting one of these, feel free to shoot us an email back with your address, and we will be sure to get one sent out to you.

Now, this idea is totally unscalable. For me to hand address a lot of envelopes per day would be exhausting and very time consuming. I wouldn't want to use one of those auto-pen tools as they take some of the personality out of this, and frankly the effort is part of the charm. I do rather enjoy seeing names I recognize from past customers. We will see how many of these I can get made and sent out before things begin to really pick up for the holidays, but if they seem to be generating good results maybe this is a tool we use during our slower times to utilize the team.

I can say that this isn't something a large luxury brand could possibly mimic without using the autopen technology, and the cost to send catalogs like this is enormous compared to usual catalog mailing rates. Hopefully, this makes for a really exciting piece of mail for people to receive, and the samples help get people to truly appreciate the value of the leather we work with.

It's also a good first step for us in our journey to the big catalog.

This is one of several whacky new ideas that I have been brainstorming on. Hopefully one of them has a little bit of that marketing magic in it that leads to a significantly disproportionate outcome for the inputs. The best way to find out is to try them.

If you want to get one of our special blue envelopes, simply reply to this email with your name and address and mention you would like one of the envelopes and I will be happy to write you one.

For those that have other fun and a little bit crazy marketing ideas I would love to hear them. Experimenting is part of the joy of small business.

Stay tuned for more letters on Thursdays or Fridays 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 MurdyCEO/Owner

Murdy Creative Co.

Cell: 414-434-9001

MurdyCreative.Co 

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