LAND OF
ODDS - Jewelry Design Center
Beads, Beading Supplies, Books
-- For the Bead and Jewelry Making Artist and Craftsperson
This period of time caught us in the major Near-Depression slow-down of the US Economy. Business, both on-line and in the shop, began slowing in September 2006. The Recession was officially declared in September of 2007. This was also a time during which the beaded jewelry fad had reached its pinnacle, and was rapidly slowing down.
This has been our first sustained slow-down in catalog, as economy slows. Our national rankings have consistently stayed very high, however. But shopper volume and average sale have dropped considerably.
For most of 14-15 years, primarily lived off catalog. Catalog 5 years ago looked like the more viable business than the bricks and mortar store. Now that outlook is reversed. In fact the catalog has declined so much, that I no longer consider it a fully viable business. It's more a supplement for the store.
Other key trends/events affecting the business:
- Continued price increases, particular with the metals, and Czech glass. Silver
hit $21+ per ounce during this period of time. It dropped down to below $9.00,
and is now back up, fluctuating between $15 and 19. Gold shot up to over $1000.00,
and has held up in the upper $900 during this time.
- The exchange rate between the dollar and euro got as high as 1.70, and is
now around 1.40. A couple years ago, I was paying currency surcharges for items
from Europe of around 20-23%. Now I'm paying between 26% (austrian crystal)
and 45-60% (Czech glass).
This has created unbelievable problems in pricing things. If you look at all my competitors online, some raise their prices in conjunction with the rate fluctations; others are clueless. When a customer wants to know why one strand of Czech glass here is now $9.00 and at another place $5.50, it's difficult to explain. From experience, I found it's better to slow our sales and keep up with the pricing. The fluctations have been so rapid and dramatic, however, that it's difficult to manage and control. Over the past few years, I've watched many bead businesses go under, and I know part of it is the pricing issue. You need to make enough profit, so that you can reinvest in new product. If you don't raise your prices on your current products, there is no longer enough profit to reinvest and purchase the same item again.
The Bead Fad has definitely run its course. That means our customer base has fewer bead stringers, and more bead weavers -- hobbiests. What is primarily selling are seed beads and plated findings. There's been a dramatic reduction in the sales of Czech glass. We sell a lot of gemstone beads, but primarily as discounted "special sales". Silver, vermeil, and gold-filled sales have dropped considerably.
Many of our suppliers have gone out of business, or have drastically reduced their inventories and selections. For most, this happens all of a sudden, leaving us with large categories of items that now are big empty holes in our catalog.
California passed a very tight lead-free law. Almost all our pewter items are no longer manufactured, because they don't meet California's new standards. There really have not been replacements yet. We were selling a lot of pewter -- sliders, toggles, letter beads, drops, more.
The economic downturn was not coming as a surprise. I early on cut out most of our advertising, except for our Bead & Button ad. This was the only ad that clearly was generating more business than the cost of the ad. People have split themselves up into smaller and smaller niche markets and it's become very difficult to reach them in cost-effective ways. You see many newspapers closing, TV newscasters getting fired, bead and craft magazines getting thinner and thinner. At the same time, you see a rise in very small local papers, web-only-newspapers, and blogs. Newspapers rarely give coverage to businesses that don't advertise in them. General websites, blogs, forums and the like have gotten very adept at keeping "commercial" messages off their sites. I even cut out our Yellow Pages ad. There are so many versions of the Yellow Pages now, that there is a very small guarantee that people using the Yellow Pages will pick up an addition in which we had advertised. To find our store in Nashville, most people do an internet search -- many on their iphones.
Shipping costs have gotten so complex and so out of line, that it's become difficult to answer customer queries about shipping with a straight face. I just throw up my hands. This period saw dramatic increases in UPS and USPS shipping costs. We began relying less on UPS and more on USPS. We post an "estimated shipping" price online, and now work to keep within that estimate, by picking and choosing shipping services. It would be so preferrable to rely on one service - UPS - but that is no longer reasonable. UPS shipping, for example, to a town that borders Nashville is $13.00.
The US Postal Service has things so hair-triggered, that you never know what some of the rates will end up being. They instituted the 13 oz pound. They instituted box size limits. They reduced the real delivery differences among first class, priority and express. For some locales, first class is cheaper than parcel post when the package is under 13oz; in other locals, the reverse relationship is in effect.
There has been a big increase in fraudulent credit card use. There are many declined cards every day, and a large percentage with the "PICK UP CARD" instructions from the banks. In the store, we stopped accepted personal checks. Too many bad ones.
We began the blog Learn To Bead...At Land of Odds. We have been rethinking the idea of advertising, and how you reach people who organize themselves in every smaller circles. We've posted some serious how-to information on the blog to attract people, and soft-pedaled the "Land of Odds" catalog. This has been working. The blog now gets 200 visitors per day.
We also increased our email campaigns. I've tried to avoid major emailing, because although you get many positive responses, you also get many negative ones as well. But, with lower visibility on line, I have to remind people that we exist. I had started a once-a-year DESIGNERS GAZETTE mailing that summarized all our activities at Land of Odds and Be Dazzled Beads. Now I send it quarterly. I increased our First Dibs Sales online, and now try to run something about every two weeks. I took our once-weekly bead-school mailing, and now also send out more targeted monthly emails to different bead/jewelry making groups.
On sadder notes, Rosie and Dottie, our store dogs, both passed away in 2008. Rosie, in particular, had very close ties to our in-store and on-line communities. We have two new store dogs -- Lily and Daisy.
One of our original customers, and close friend, Connie Welch, also passed away. She was very instrumental in our success.
From time to time, we have decided to relate and share some of our e-commerce experiences with our customers and friends. Doing business on the Internet is a new thing, a wonderful thing and something not quite the same as running a regular store, and not quite the same as operating a mail-order print catalog business. The Internet is very democratic, and we feel our on-line store should mirror some of the aspects of Internet culture. The Internet is very "information-centered" as well, and our store should also be. We want to chronicle our successes, trials and tribulations.
Some of our goals have changed, since we became a primarily-on-line enterprise, and closed our main store.
Our goals for our catalog include:
| On April 29, 2003 | On May 3, 2003 | On June 29, 2003 | On Nov 3, 2003 | On Nov 3, 2004 | On 8/17/2005 | On 3/2/2006 | On 6/10/2009 | ||
| # of unique visitors per day | 1950 | 300 | 1250 | 2450 | 3800 | 5000 | 5000 | 2500 | |
| # of active links that come up on Google | 1550 | 40 | 2190 | 3290 | 7900 | 13200 | 53,200 | 1120 | |
| % of visits that result in orders | .66 | .77 | .77 | .77 | .78 | .78 | 1.42 | 1.45 | |
| average time spend in catalog | 7 minutes | 10 minutes | 28 minutes | 28 minutes | 32 minutes | 32 minutes | 32 minutes | 10 minutes | |
| google ranking on the keyword "beading supplies" | 18 | indeterminate | 8 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | not in top 100 | |
| google ranking on the keyword "bead supplies" | 8 | 5 | 3 | 84 | |||||
| google ranking on the keyword "beads" | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | not ranked | 48 | not in top 100 | |
| google ranking on the keyword "clasps" | 4 | 2 | 3 | 5 | |||||
| google ranking on the keyword "jewelry findings" | 6 | 4 | 4 | not in top 100 | |||||
| #
of sites on google search engine that come up with keyword "beads" (was only 250,000 when we began the catalog in 1996) |
9.2 million | 5.4 million | 48.9 million | 40.0 million | |||||
| average order amount | $47.50 | no average computed | $67.00 | $71.00 | $75.00 | $75.00 | $55.72 | $45.92 | |
| orders per day | 12 | 0 | 8 | 12 | 12 | 14 | 18 | 8 | |
| average items per order | 15 | 0 | not determined | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 4 | |
proportion of orders by returning customers
|
not collected | not collected | not collected | not collected | 24% | 28% | 33% | 36% | |
| Ranking.com Rank among all beading sites |
8 | 12 | 5 but dropped as low as 16 in this time period | ||||||
| Ranking.com Rank among all web sites |
283,121 | 361,205 | 329,666 | ||||||
| Trustgauge.com Level of Trust |
4 out of 10 | 6 out of 10 | 6 out of 10 | ||||||
| Linkstoyou.com Links pointing to us |
1,500 | 4,784 | 2,297 | ||||||
| Linkstoyou.com Link Popularity |
47,367 | 37.774 |
Thanks for being there for us and with us,
Warren and James