Behind the Scenes - 11/22/24

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.

This week was the first of our Limited Edition drops, and I'm excited for what it creates for us, but I'm getting ahead of myself in the story. For those who don't know, this Thanksgiving is very late on the calendar, and Christmas falls in a way so that shipping deadlines have to be much earlier, so we have a real production crunch ahead of us. Thankfully, we have had a smooth (if not a little slower) few weeks for us to get our prep work and processes streamlined and I think we are in a good place to manage the sales spike.

All this to be said, its better to get your order in early and hold onto it for a little while, so please don't wait. I have no idea what the future holds and we might get totally swamped very quickly.

Our Black Friday Cyber Monday deal is already live and isn't going to change so you won't miss out on anything by waiting. For those who missed it before we are doing something a little different this year and offering a $50 gift card for every purchase of $200 or more, and a $150 gift card for every purchase of $500 or more. Get yourself that cool gift you always wanted, and then give the gift card to someone special (or you could always reverse that).

Ok, now I can talk about the limited edition drops.

I've constantly had to fight with myself over product line expansions. Designing and making new items is genuinely the best part of my job. I do however have to contend with the fact that ever growing product lines create their own issues. For one, if we get too far afield in our product launches, we can confuse our customers about what it is we actually make. Are we a journal company, or a briefcase company, or a company that makes script covers, and so on and so forth. This expansion can lead to brand dilution (although it can be brand expansion if you do the products well and can explain that to the customers) where people might struggle to explain to their friends or coworkers what the Murdy Creative Co. makes.

Our accessories line is a good example. We have some great options for wallets, sunglasses cases, mousepads, valet trays, and other things like that. They all meet our high quality standards and are made with our exceptional leather, but they don't sell very well. I would say that they are priced competitively for what they are, and are certainly priced lower than our journal lineup, but most people focus on our journals. Perhaps thats just because I market the journals more directly and with a higher budget, but I think its because people don't think of us as a leather company, they think of us as a leather journal company.

That can be a very good thing. Last week in my BTS email I talked about the Google effect and how diluting "what you do" can have a negative affect on how people view you. After all, the search engine that only does search is probably better than the search engine trying to also be a social media company. At least that's the thought process. So for people to view us as a leather journal company helps reinforce the truth that we do make the best journals, however that can also become a limiting factor in our growth.

We are trying to solve this in two ways. One, we need to use good storytelling to show people that everyone needs a good leather journal. It may not be for writing about daily events, but there is some aspect of your life that would benefit from you having a leather journal. That effort hopefully grows the overall user base of leather journals, and thus we benefit from being the best in that category.

The other solution is to try expand the lineup in tangentially beneficial ways to the core journal product line. For example, a briefcase can hold your journal, or a folio can be a journal in a different format. These additional products can help provide the supporting things that people need to fully utilize their journal. It also allows us to expand the customer base to people who aren't journalers but do use wallets (as an example).

As we expand the product line, our website becomes more complex. This complexity is a hinderance to customers in a few ways. What is the right product for me? Have I actually found the perfect product, or are there other options in a different spot? I saw an ad for the product, but what was it called? The list goes on. Now good website design can help limit some of these feelings (and we have a long way to go in improving our website on this front) but it can never fully eliminate it. So I am hesitant to keep launching new things.

So how does this all tie back to the limited edition drops?

They provide an opportunity to do something new, that won't make the website complexity worse.

There are other benefits for them too. They create an exclusive product line, with a unique "limited edition" logo on them. When we do small drops we can also test out the waters on new potential launches. If we were to do a limited drop of a red leather item (hint hint) it would be in a single cut and with a specific insert and would have a different Murdy logo on the back from any potential "special edition" launches. If that item sold well, it would help justify potentially launching a full special edition lineup in that color but would still be unique in its logo to help distinguish it as the smaller run limited edition version.

We can also use it to showcase products that may be less well known like the accessories I mentioned before. Due to the small quantity, we can create some amazing variety amongst them as well and try things that wouldn't make sense to do as a full launch. Crazy embossed patters, wild colors, exotic leather, everything is on the table. So tune in Thursdays at 11am central time to check out the new limited edition drop. The last one was gone within a few hours.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you like the limited edition idea? Are there issues you see with it? Is it something that you would tune in for even if you didn't intend to buy? I want to hear from you guys.

Stay tuned for more letters on 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