Behind the Scenes - 11/14/24
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.
It's been awhile since I've done one of these. The hope had been to launch the new products earlier in the week so that we could still do the behind the scenes on Friday's, but launching new products has turned out to be a more complex operation that it used to be. So when the new No. 7 Stationary and Tabloid Cut Covers and the No. 8 Memo and Director Cut Covers were launched it took over the usual behind the scenes slot.
The new products are doing well. I've been accidentally discovering a lot of cool things about the Stationary Cut leather cover and it's creating a new problem. I had designed it orignally to work with letter paper. The idea was to have a simple, easy to replace the page, option for our restaurant clients (of which there are not that many). The Tabloid and the Stationery together were going to form a menu and wine menu combo. That was at least the first idea.
I realized that with our eventual expansion abroad (which is available now but not particularly heavily advertised) it wouldn't be very difficult to make the Stationery Cut compatible with A4 paper as well as letter which makes it internationally compatible. So we did just that.
We also realized that many people might want to use this more like a custom notebook than its original idea for a wine menu so we made the spine thick enough to hold up to 30 sheets of paper. If someone wanted to use only one or two they could press the tines of the rod down and it would still work well enough, so this seemed a good change. People could custom print out booklets or their own page designs and make something unique to them.
This however brought another idea which is that it would work well with the Leuchtturm1917 Softcover A5 inserts due to the now thicker spine. Some of you might be seeing the problem.
The Leuchtturm1917 inserts are excellent quality and I've actually been using a Stationery Cut with one of them as my daily journal. I like it quite a lot. I had never imagined I would use anything but my Classic Cut to journal, but here I am. It just has a good size and feel in hand. I like to tuck my pen in the gutter of the page I'm on as well to keep my spot, but I digress.
We do offer an "A5 cut" cover which is similar in size, but since it was originally designed around the thinner saddle stitched cheap inserts it doesn't work with the Leuchtturm1917 A5 inserts. This is made all the more confusing since those type of saddle stitched inserts aren't actually A5. Almost all of them are slightly too narrow when closed to be A5 (which I think is because they are made using A5 paper and then trimmed down). So customers are very limited in their paper options.
So now we have a cover that works with letter paper, A4 paper, A5 Leuchtturm1917 softcover inserts (as well as most "real" a5 softcover alternatives of reasonable thickness), and it even could work with the thinner saddle stitched A5 insert (although the insert do swim a bit in it).
Do we discontinue the "A5 Cut" cover?
Well last week we did just that.
We kept the item listed in the menu with an explanation page as to why it was discontinued with a link to the Stationery Cut to help people looking for it find the better option.
And now we come to the real problem.
Google discovered in the early days of the internet that by doing only one thing, "search", they were thought of as the best search engine (while Yahoo tried to do everything). This new product we have launched is arguably one of our best all around most useful options, and is sold at a fantastic price, but I'm worried the mixed identity may confuse people.
So how do I go about fixing this problem? Do we focus on one aspect of its capability and basically ignore the rest, or only reference them tangentially? Do we lean into the "everything" mindset and focus on "this one product can do whatever you need" and try to nail it down that way?
This is made all the more complicated in that we have been working on developing better options for our fountain pen users since they have strong opinions about the paper (and rightly so) in their notebooks. The Stationery Cut can be the perfect fix because you can make it work with whatever off the shelf letter paper you find works best with your pen. They are a smaller demographic however, so if we lean on that functionality too hard, it limits the product's reach.
I haven't really figured this out yet and would appreciate anyone's feedback. For those who aren't familiar with the product and want to see more about it here is the link to it's product page.
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 Murdy
CEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
MurdyCreative.Co
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