30 December 2005

Here's more on Bush's approval rating...

...this time from The Onion:

21 December 2005

Three general lessons I've learned so far...

...after 7 or 8 months of this experiment in small business:

1. hang on to your cash
Cash is the lifeblood of any business, and conserving cash - or at least deploying it very carefully - could be the most important responsibility of a business's management. My biggest mistake with Wavelength involved one of my first big decisions: whether to order large quantities of shirts in each design (which would mean a big cash investment but a low per-shirt cost) or to order small quantities of each design (which would mean a smaller up-front investment but a higher per-shirt cost).

I went with option A, which I partly justified by thinking "if the company takes off, I'll eventually sell all these shirts anyway." And I was also worried that I might be flooded with orders and not have the shirts to fulfill them. But some designs proved to be unpopular, and I soon realized that - even though other designs were selling relatively well - I would be stuck with large quantities of the unpopular shirts, and the cash I'd spent on them was gone forever. So be tight with that cash, and also rememember that...

2. focus groups are your friend
Along with tightening my pursestrings, I could have used a focus group or a poll of some sort to get a feel for which designs would be hot and which would be cold. In hindsight, this sounds like a no-brainer, but in the business's early days - before I even had an email list - I didn't really have an idea of how to go about getting a large sample of people to weigh in on my shirt ideas, and I decided to just go to market. Today, I realize I should have put more time into coming up with a polling strategy early on. In addition, I should have been more willing to...

3. adapt early - and shut down early if necessary
July 2005 was a big month for Wavelength Clothing. Shirts were printed and stored in my garage, the website was up and running, and I started using Google's AdWords program to drive traffic to my site. As I've described in earlier posts, AdWords brought me 300 visitors a day at a cost of $0.10 a visitor, so at the end of July, I'd spent about $1,000 and had 10,000 people check out the merchandise online.

Of these 10,000 visitors, only about 25 bought shirts - a number that was well below the 100 to 1,000 that I had hoped for. In the small picture, this meant that the AdWords program - which I had expected to rely on as a major source of sales - was a money-loser I would have to discontinue. In the big picture, it meant that Internet sales in general were going to be much harder to come by than I had thought, and that I would soon have to test different sales approaches like boothing it up at farmer's markets and college campuses.

The biggest message from the AdWords results was one that I didn't want to hear: my shirts might not be anywhere near as marketable as I thought they would be. In hindsight, I probably should have grown much more hesitant to invest any more money into the business. But with large quantities of shirts on hand (see lessons 1 and 2 above) and a stubbornly optimistic outlook in mind, I would hold off on cutting off the cash for several months.

13 December 2005

Bush's handlers are good at the imagery game...

...think of the Mission Accomplished photo op, or all those speeches where Bush stands in front of phrases like "Strategy for Victory." Those backdrops are set up by marketing pros, and the images help coax certain perspectives on Bush and his policies into viewers' heads.

Al Franken talks a bit about this strategic use of imagery in his book, which I first mentioned a few posts back. His best example is a commercial from the final stretch of W's campaign against Kerry:

The ad, which played like a trailer for a horror movie, showed flashes of wolf fur and fangs amid the leafy shadows of a deep, dark forest. An ominously somber announcer voiced the script:

In an increasingly dangerous world...
Even after the first terrorist attack on America...
John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations by 6 billion dollars...
Cuts so deep they would have weakened America's defenses.
And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.

At this point, a group of wolves lounging in a grassy clearing arose and began advancing toward the viewer. And then the tagline:

I'm George W. Bush and I approve this message.

Franken points out that the ad is misleading as well as frightening. For instance, the reference to "the first terrorist attack on America" probably made you think of 9/11, right? It actually refers to the '93 WTC bombing, and the period after that incident was an era in which all of Washington was voting to scale back intelligence spending. Anyway, you can watch this fun little mind-bender here.

11 December 2005

Gauging public opinion with a poll...

...was something I should have done before printing a single t-shirt. Last week I set up a web poll that asked people to look at some potential new designs and tell me which, if any, they or someone they know might purchase. Sure enough, the results surprised me: one of the two top vote-getters was the "Liberal" design at right, which I thought would be too contentious for most people's taste.

The other top finisher was "Remain Ignorant," with my favorite new design - "Word Up G" - coming in third. Each of the top three designs was approved by at least one-third of the people who voted, so I'll keep them in mind as potential future shirts. I'll hang on to the other designs, too, but they didn't poll well so I doubt they'll see the light of day.

01 December 2005

I recently saw "the Wal-Mart movie"...

...its proper name is WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price, and it convinced me not to patronize the chain that many progressives despise almost as much as they despise that other W. The movie's two most thorough arguments described Wal-Mart's despicably aggressive union-busting activities and its strategy of wringing out some extra savings by intentionally keeping stores understaffed.

Uggh. Can we accept that type of employee treatment at one of America's largest and most powerful companies?

Both behaviors strike me as significant violations of the good old golden rule, so I'm not going to support Wal-Mart anymore. I hope awareness and disapproval of some of the company's practices will grow and lead to change.

To be honest, I had shopped at Wal-Mart for some Wavelength Clothing supplies in the past, though I only went a couple times, and my purchases totaled less than $100. Back then, I was familiar with some of the general complaints about the chain but was ignorant of details. So I'm grateful to the makers of the movie for their reporting, and for their grassroots, emails-and-neighborhood-meetings distribution approach. I watched the movie with about 50 other folks at an Ocean Beach community center, and the "town meeting" aspect of it felt great.