|
As many of you who have been customers or followers of us for some time will know, things have been rough with our distributor relationship and the state of business due to the global economy at large and we've been doing everything we can to try and stay afloat and remain with our distributor but the truth is that we are not making enough sales to sustain the business in the way it stands currently. We had to scale back Dan a few months back, having him do some social media and video content creation instead while Travis picks back up with all order fulfillment but we have reduced our pay to such a low level in the last few months that April has had to pick back up working full time at her vet medicine job and remand all day to day operations to Trav and she will be focusing on some more steering roles and social media/video related tasks and when we do get larger supply orders in stock, jumping in to get new items listed and stuff split as quickly as possible with Trav's help.
Next month we will be making an announcement on a new affiliated Nendoroid hobby project that will help to grow the Nendoroid community and hopefully draw support to sustain the project efforts itself, grow the social media and YouTube channels and ultimately the Chop Shop business at large. A lot of exciting additions and features will be discussed as we move into diversifying our focus within the Nendoroid hobby. More on this in next month's newsletter.
As we have indicated in the past, our relationship with the distributor has been rough and we are trying to work out a deal that will preserve that relationship if possible, but ultimately allow us to shift our spending into areas that are actually generating business because right now they are a complete waste of time and money for our business and were it not for the fear of breaking our purchase agreement and having legal issues with severing ties, we would simply walk away from them today, but we are somewhat bound by a possible contract to continuing purchasing what we have pre-ordered and until that pool of items has been bought or negotiated down, we don't have much recourse.
If we do end up severing ties with the distributor, we have a plan in place for meeting all remaining customer preorders as quickly as possible and if not, arranging to credit or refund customers where necessary if items cannot be obtained. More on this in next month's newsletter.
We have also started an advertising campaign on YouTube and Google which will hopefully draw new attention to the business with text and video ads which will take a couple months to see if they are cost effective or just another sink of money we don't have. Initial analytics over the first few days has been promising however with a fair number of people clicking through to check out the site, so hopefully in time this will start translating to new sales. We do have a fairly healthy level of new customers every day and I hope these campaigns will drive even more.
|
