New Starts

I'm not someone who makes New Year Resolutions but for both our online and traveling shop, the new year is a great time to roll out new products.  I thought I'd share a little bit about what goes into offering new products.

First, we are constantly watching at shows and online on social media for new and interesting products.  We want useful and fairly unique products for our line.  We need to have a good balance of products we produce and products we order from other companies.  Why is this?  We make a better profit on items we produce and we can control the inventory much easier as well.  Of course when we are on the road we can't produce anything so that can potentially create a different problem.  It's much easier to simply receive a box of items that are ready to sell, but since we travel so much it becomes a juggling act to time the delivery of shipments to a location we know we will be at.  We've had a couple of missed deliveries!

The products that we select must be useful and affordable.  We must limit the number of products that require demonstration to understand as we can only demo one or two products at a time at shows.  We must be able to order the products easily and in reasonable quantities.

New products are always risky.  Asking customers if they would buy an item if we carried it is far different from the reality of actual sales.  We take a risk investing in new products but it sure is exciting!