Behind the Scenes - 2/21/25

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.

With a four day week (due to the federal holiday on Monday) this week, the production schedule was a bit more packed than usual. The team has off all federal holidays, both because I'm a good boss who feels that time off is a good thing for people, and also as a relic of times past. Once upon a time, way back in the the Year of our Lord 2019 we used the United States Postal Service for our deliveries. Clearly the company has evolved, but during that time we couldn't ship out orders on federal holidays so I decided it would be company policy to have them off. Despite the change in our shipper, we still hold to the old ways.

Post Valentine's Day we saw a few days in a row with unusually depressed sales. I say unusually, in the context of the wider month and year as a whole, but when I went and looked back at last year, we had a similar dip at the same time. It's strange and I can't quite point to any one obvious cause. Especially when the scale of the dip is taken into consideration. It's statistically significant.

The good news was that last year the dip was short and the week after was a statistically significantly higher than average week. Sure enough, a few days went by and we are back doing our usual numbers or better.

During the down time though I took a hard look at our ad campaigns on the various social platforms. I pruned a few of the dead leaves away and took the time really dive into the numbers on which ads were most successful. Interestingly enough, its very rare (to the point of me not finding a good example in the last 12 months) that an ad is the "best" across all the major metrics. In all these examples they had cost-per-sale that was similar, but one ad would be best for click through rate, another for add to carts, and so on. It wasn't that the best, lowest cost-per-sale ad, had the best metrics in every category.

It really drives home the point that a "good" ad is a bit of a mystery, and even a good performing ad might have a unique reason. I'll give you an example. Supposed an ad has a good cost-per-sale, but has a bad click through rate, and a below average add to cart rate. That might indicate that the ad doesn't have a good "mass appeal" but that for some people it is the perfect ad. Those people when they see that ad decide then and there to buy even before they get to the website. That's why the conversion rate could be high, but the click through rate and add to cart rate is low.

During this pruning I realized that we only have one Classic Cut Journal ad running, and its only getting a tiny fraction of a budget each day. This was a genuine surprise to me because the Classic Cut has been the backbone of our most successful ads for years. Pick any random day in the last 3 years and the odds would be good that the Classic Cut Journal ad got the most spend and the best cost-per-sale.

So I decided I wanted to rectify the hole in the ad lineup and film a new Classic Cut ad. This brought another question though. What ad do we make? Our Stationery Cut Leather Cover ad has been doing well and it tells a bit of a story. Internally I call in the "out with the old and in with the new" ad. So naturally I wanted to try to tell a story with the Classic Cut. This is where I go back to the tale as old as time.

Our Classic Cut Journal is a foundational, staple design. It's the classic (pun absolutely intended) journal that has been used by writers and thinkers for years. Perhaps not in this exact format, but it carries on the same feel as those journal did. Its the quintessential journal. Simple, beautiful, and versatile. So how do you tell that old story in a way that feels new and fresh?

To be honest I'm still not sure, so instead I told it in the same way its been told before.

For me the best part of the Classic Cut is its legacy. Year after year it is the same. It represents the unchanging reality that there is something deeply meaningful in pen and paper and leather. A full journal, slid on the shelf, is an accomplishment. Each day may seem unimportant, but its like a single dot in a picture, the more of them you see the more the totality of your life takes shape.

So I did my best to put that into 15 seconds.

The world we live in runs on 15 second videos.

For those curious about how that video turned out, its our most recent post on Instagram. I wish I had more time (and frankly a bit more writing talent) to properly capture these big ideas in a small space. Never let it be said that good writers aren't important. Now more than ever it takes a great deal of talent to put big ideas into very short videos. Only time will tell if this ad is a good one. I'm hopeful though. I think it begins to grasp a bit of the bigger story. Maybe that will be enough to inspire someone to begin their journaling life.

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 Murdy CEO/Owner

Murdy Creative Co.

Cell: 414-434-9001

MurdyCreative.Co 

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