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Wanted to sort of chronicle our year here, because it was pretty stormy!
Jan-March we were unable to ship pretty much anything. We ship from China, so we were totally fucked. Tons of orders sitting at our warehouse. Thanks to the patience of our customers, we made it through and started shipping again in April.
In April, we decided to scale up marketing budgets to make up for the lost few months at the start of the year. Coincidentally, this was the time when ads were GIGA cheap. We made a killing!
I'll add, this brand was actually a sort of a passive project for us. For 2019, we barely ran any ads. After April, we went back to passive mode. We had some ads, but we mostly relied on passive traffic (this is a brand started in 2017) while we worked on other projects.
In September, a disaster happened. A portion of the goods we were selling turned out to be unlicensed (this store had 500 skus). We got a letter from a lawyer about this and are currently in a legal battle over the allegedly unlicensed items.
Funnily, a month earlier, we shut down the other project we were working on more actively. That projects supplier basically died off due to COVID so we decided to focus on the "passive" project fulltime... Yeah. What a timing!
In Sept, we decided to pivot the passive project and work on it fulltime. We didn't want any future licensing trouble and thought this would be for the best.
We worked what felt like 24/7, consuming more redbulls than what is legal for a month. We reworked our whole operation. It started out slow, until the few weeks before BFCM when we started picking off STEAM!
In Dec, we have continued our upwards trajectory. Honestly, these have been some terrifying months with a massive toll mentally. But looking and talking about this feels good. The graph goes up! Excited for 2021, but also excited to hopefully at some point find a few weeks off
If someone gives this thread a thread, thank you. I mostly just wanted to write it out for myself as well as because from the outside it's easy to assume it's all smooth scaling, and constant easy growth. It's rarely like that. Have a lovely new years eve.
5-10 next year or bust.
