Behind the Scenes - 10/11/24

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.

First of all, thank you to those who have participated in both the customer survey from last week as well as those who voted in the naming poll for the new products. That feedback is a huge help to us as we work through the details.

The customer survey had some really interesting findings. For those who read the second half of the blog post about what I had suspected was the "real reason" that factor actually scored really highly and the supporting factors for that theory were also some of the highest scoring.

I was able to use the feedback to build out customer personas. These are a common tool used by marketing to try to develop the data into clusters of common purchasers. Prego famously developed this with Howard Moskowitz after realizing that it was impossible to make one sauce that could please everyone, but if they made three sauce types they could please most of the people. Malcolm Gladwell in his TED talk titled Choice, Happiness, and Spaghetti Sauce talks about the concept in greater detail if you are interested in learning more about the process.

Now interestingly enough, the persona that was shown to be our best customers and the most likely to repeat were not who I expected. In hindsight, they make a lot of sense, but the important thing is that what they valued wasn't what I was focusing on in my advertising. In fact, my recent ads have arguably been uninteresting to that group.

Hopefully I can use this to my advantage. I have the full report in a leather folder on my desk, waiting for a few more hours for me to dive into it deeply. I am excited as the early results of the new ads that target this buyer persona seem to be having strong results. They are still in the learning phase so everything is fluid, but I'm excited for what it could mean for us long term.

As to our new product launches, we have the first round of items coming out in the middle of next week, and another round the week after. I swore several years back that I wouldn't launch new products right before Christmas as they always make for production headaches as we work through the kinks at the worst possible time, however I want these out.

Those of you who got our last poll know that one of the products is a leather cover like our other Murdy No. 7 covers, and is designed to work with 8.5" x 11" paper folded in half (for an effective sheet size of 8.5" x 5.5"). What I failed to mention in my poll was that the other size we are launching is designed for 11" x 17" sheets folded in half (for an effective sheet size of 8.5"x11"). We are calling that one the Tabloid Cut.

Hopefully realizing the other option we are launching you can see how that may have affected people's choice between Letter Cut and Stationery (thank you to those who messaged me letting me know the proper spelling) Cut.

Does the Letter Cut mean is uses letter size paper as a refill, or that the size of the page in the cover is letter sized?

Thankfully, despite the Letter Cut winning out on our Instagram poll, the online poll numbers were much more in favor of Stationery Cut, and when combined together the "Stationery Cut" won out by a slim margin. So all in all, the confusion is for the most part, avoided.

I also like that it implies a use. This is made to work with your own customer Stationery. It allows for you to fill it with your own watercolor paper, or the paper you like to use with your fountain pen (a common complaint of the Moleskine is that it doesn't do a good job preventing bleed-through with fountain pens). It also can work as a way to bind a short custom printed book if you like. The Stationery Cut can hold 20 sheets of 24lb paper, so that comes out to a total of 160 usable pages front and back.

I've been carrying one around for the last week, and have really fallen in love with the design. I think I may make myself some custom designed paper and use those sheets in it.

I'm very excited for these new product launches so stay tuned for more info next week as well as a slew of new videos on our social media going over the designs in their full glory.

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