12-27-2018
Marigold & Grey Discloses Their Progress on 2018 Business Goals
FILED IN: Behind-the-Scenes, Holiday & Seasonal
Posted By: Jamie Kutchman, Founder
I'm proud to say we met almost all of our 2018 goals! Not ALL, but most.
Our first goal was to introduce new gift designs in our online shop covering far more occasions. For example, we added mom & baby options, a birthday gift, gender neutral options for client gifting, additional housewarming choices, and even a sympathy gift! We added budget-friendly wedding welcome gifts for clients who don't meet our minimums for custom gift design. And, after a bazillion requests, we even added a restroom amenity box to join our existing restroom amenity basket already in the online shop.
Our second goal was to drastically improve our online checkout experience for our clients. We accomplished this by relaunching our entire website along with new visual brand and a completely overhauled ready-to-ship gift box collection. By migrating to the Shopify platform, we simplified the checkout process for our clients while also making it far easier for us to process orders quickly!
Our third goal was to recommit to monthly newsletters. Confession. We didn't send a formal newsletter every single month. But, we did successfully redesign our newsletter publication The Studio Scene and began communicating with our audience via email on a much more regular basis, newsletter included! We pushed past our unsubscribe-phobia and made peace with the fact that not everyone will want us in their inbox forever and that that's okay. We also invited the world behind the scenes by launching our own vlog and Youtube channel!
Our fourth goal was to further scale our operations. While this is still in progress, we took the first initial step by making the tough decision to expand our existing Operations position into two separate positions instead of just one. The business continues to grow, as does the complexity of our custom projects. At the same time, the e-commerce side of the business is rapidly expanding too. With this growth comes the need to invest in operations so we can continue to take on the types of projects we love and continue to deliver a very high level of client satisfaction. (We are currently hiring for Operations positions so if you're interested, visit here).
Our fifth and final goal was to develop a formal program to give back.This is where we fell short. Our thought was to partner with a food bank or charity that would take excess snacks off of our hands so the snacks would be put to good use rather than risking expiring and going to waste in our studio. To be honest, this program never materialized. We began gifting our USPS, UPS and Fedex drivers with regular snacks and because this was so appreciated by them, we didn't develop the official charity partnership that I had wanted to. Our drivers work very hard and regularly work extremely long hours. By the time they make it to us in the afternoon, they're tired and some haven't even had lunch yet. We've loved serving as an unofficial rest spot for them to grab a snack on their way out the door to tide them over. While this isn't the formal charity program that I'd originally envisioned, it is still a form of giving back. And while we don't intend to stop this practice, rest assured that we still intend to formalize a charity program in 2019! While it may be late, we WILL meet this goal in the way in which it was intended.
We hope you'll continue providing us feedback on what we're doing well and ways in which you think we can improve. Go ahead, take a minute to hit reply (or reach out here) and let us know what you think! We really do take this to heart when establishing our goals each year. And stay tuned because our goals for 2019 are coming soon!
All images by Lissa Ryan Photography
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