Life of an Artisan

Through the years, shaving enthusiasts have shown interest in the business side of being an artisan.  Here is the latest version.

Life of an Artisan

One of the challenges of growing a business is how many hours it takes.  There is always more to achieve than you can get done and you really have to pick and choose what to focus on.

Consider the past week or two.

We moved to FedEx for most shipments.  It took a lot of time to re-design packaging to decrease weight and keep the change affordable.  The good thing is that we now ship every day.  A large swath of the map gets shipments in 1-2 days, mainly 2 days.  The west coast, unfortunately, still takes a week.  We seldom have problems with FedEx.  You can pretty well count on them to make on-time deliveries. 

We launched Sublime.  Launches are time consuming, though enjoyable. 

A new intern has joined us.  He’s a sharp MBA student.  He will primarily focus on fragrance marketing.  He is also teaching me about using social media software and will help us get on Tik-Tok.

A new phone and Internet has been great.  As with anything Telecom related,  there was a big mess that had to be cleaned up which took hours. 

So, thieves steel a bunch of credit card numbers.  They may small purchases from folks like us to see if the cards is good. So, I started getting all these high risk orders.  I just cancelled them. However, once the card is charged, I have to pay to cancel it, whether its or not its a fraudulent purchase. 

But, it causes a bigger problem.  I got a message from Mailchimp, our newsletter provider.  They said that I was getting too many hard bounces - which are emails that can’t be delivered.  They said I need to get it fixed or email providers would start putting our email in spam folders, which is the kiss of death.

The issue was that when an order is placed, the system automatically sends a confirmation email.  So, it took several hours, but I think we have it set up so that it will cancel the order before before the confirmation email is sent.

Nice progress has been made with search engine optimization.  It’s mind numbing and time consuming work, but it makes a big difference.