Dear Friends,
We are back and better than ever! For those of you who have missed these behind the scenes emails and our podcast, don't fear as they are returning. I'm hoping to have the return of the podcast next week as I've been battling a cold this week and my voice is quite rough.
The start of this new year and the end of last year was surprising to say the least. We go on our Christmas break a few days before the actual holiday due to the fact that even if we shipped out orders they wouldn't arrive in time for Christmas, and I like to give my people more time around this holiday for travel. Usually that isn't too much of an issue from a production standpoint because our orders drop off dramatically at that point. This year however, we had surprisingly strong sales all the way through into the new year.
After diving into it a bit more, I discovered that our advertising of social media has optimized a bit better, and more importantly, one of our collaborators on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@ParkerNotes) had made a video featuring our product around that time. He had joined our program where influencers can promote us on their channels and give their audience a discount while getting a commission on the sales driven by their promotion (read more about that here https://murdycreative.co/collab).
His videos had driven almost as much traffic to our site as some of our other paid advertising streams and he has made quite a bit of money on the sales generated by that. All in all, I couldn't be more thrilled with this and hope to be able to bring on more influencers like him in the future.
All this to say that when I returned from my usual pilgrimage to visit my family in Texas over New Years, there was quite a backlog of orders. The team had done an excellent job in my absence, but as a small team of 4 when one person is away it can have a big impact on production. Normally this isn't an issue since we are so slow, but this year was different.
This has been compounded by the spine bar fiasco...
So we ran out of the spine bars for our Classic and Metric journals right at the end of the Christmas orders just before break. The Classic Cut journals are one of our best selling products and I was going to be out on vacation for awhile even after the normal Christmas break. As I had mentioned in a prior letter, we are going to be making them in house out of stainless steel. On the last day we were in the office, all of the tools finally arrived for me to begin to make them. Knowing I was going to be gone, and that no one else knew how to make them, I decided I would spend the first day of my break making enough bars to tie them over until my return.
It took me less than 3 hours to realize that this change was a huge mistake...
Rather than 1 day, it took my 3 ten hour days to get enough bars stockpiled for the days I would be gone. Yes, some of that time was spent learning and trying new methods to speed it up, but most of the time was spent just making them. To make a long story short, the bars take much longer and with much higher error rates to make in house this way than I had estimated. Since we have a very streamlined labor force, as our demand for products grows, so too does our demand for bars grow. So during times of spiking demand, we get squeezed on the labor front from two directions.
During the days while I was making bars I had a good deal of time to think about what to do next. One option would be to revert to our old bars. The main problem with that was both that it would put us right back where we have been for years, and it would also take 6-8 weeks to get them in stock so it wouldn't really help now. Another option would be to try to find a new supplier, but we had looked into that earlier in the Christmas season and didn't have any success. Finally there was the most extreme option, and the one that I like best.
We get a CNC mill...
Now this topic of the mill, the different ideas we have explored, the many conversations with machinists and experts, and the obvious challenges deserves a letter all to its own (and probably a full 20 minute podcast episode to expand on that). So I will save that for a later time, but in short we are moving down this path.
But that still doesn't solve the fact that upon my return we needed more bars to be made. So rather than being able to jump into production to help with our backlog, I needed to go and make bars.
And then the snow came...
This week we are going from no snow on the ground to an estimated 22 inches of snowfall. That is due to two storms, one on Tuesday, and one on Friday that are each supposed to drop around 10 inches or more. For those who haven't experienced that kind of snowfall before, at that rate, the snowplows can't clear the roads fast enough and it becomes dangerous for even seasoned Wisconsin drivers to traverse any distances. On top of that we are in a rural part of the state and our team has people that drive a half hour or more over country roads to get here, so those roads often don't get plowed as often.
So all this to say, we are a little bit behind our normal lead times. In fact I looked it up, and this is the longest lead time we have had in company history.
Normally we have federal holidays off, and Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, however after a vote from the team we are deciding to move that holiday to Friday and forgo the dangerous travel conditions. We are also bringing back one of our former employees who worked for the company years ago and left to work for a YouTuber to help us dig out (pun absolutely intended) from this backlog.
My hope is that by Friday of next week we are back within our 3-5 business day lead time, and by the end of the week after we are back to 2-4 business days or less.
I want to say thank you once again to everyone who has been so patient with us, and for those who this is their first order with the company, please note that this is very unusual for us.
Tune in next week to the podcast on Tuesday for more details about the mill and other things I couldn't fit into this already enormous letter.
Ever your servant,
Colin Murdy
CEO/Owner
Murdy Creative Co.
Cell: 414-434-9001
