Marketing 101-- What not to do.

I regretted that I did not get any Bow Rests ready for the Oct. 1 opening of bow season, but by October 15 I had fifteen ready for sale. Wanting to see what value people would put on the Bow Rest I put one on a seven day auction on Ebay with a starting bid of $39.95. After three days there were no bids, but 15 people were watching the item, encouraging I
My Ebay pictures
thought. Then the first bid came in at the minimum. Later I learned that the bid was by a friend who had wanted a Bow Rest and wanted to get the bidding started, "stir the pot" as he described it. Well, it turned out that he bought it for the minimum bid. Next I resubmitted as a seven day auction with a minimum bid of $0.99 and asked my friends not to bid so I could see what value people in general put on my product.

Unfortunately, this time there were about 30 watchers, but no bidders until the last day. It actually went for $1.04, just two bids! This was revealing indeed. When I show bow hunters these pictures in person, the usual response is "Looks like a great idea." Why then were people unwilling to place a reasonable value on the Bow Rest?

What did I learn from this experience? Apparently Ebay is not the place to introduce a new idea or product. Lesson number two: PayPal sent an email asking whether I wanted to accept the bid of a person with no feedback, and I foolishly said yes. This person had nothing to gain by sending a report since he had no feedback record to spoil. Therefore why bother to send a report?

How could I get my message out? All my sales (all three of them) were to people who knew me and were aware of my success with the Bow Rest. Being 73 years of age, almost all my friends had given up bow hunting long ago. I figured I needed a web site where I could present the Bow rest to the public in general. Never having had a web site before, I naively assumed that if you put up a web site, people will find it using the search engines and I would have a national market for the Bow Rest. I found a hosting company that offered to register a domain name, prepare a web site, and submit the site to the search engines for only $80 per month. With my limited resources this sounded pretty good.

The domain name bowrest.com was taken, but I was told that my second choice, bowstabilizer.com was available. By email I sent in pictures of my bow rest, a description of what it does and how it works, and its features (shoot more accurately, hold a draw longer, minimizes game spooking movement, etc.). What I got was a web site that had none of my pictures or information and which was totally inappropriate. Fortunately they had a web modification program that was very good. In two weeks of trial and error I was able to come up with a reasonable web site.

I published it to the web, but was unable to get to it by typing the url into my browser. Instead I got a site offering the domain name for sale for $900. When I complained to customer service, I was told to wait and they would get the domain for me. I certainly knew they would not pay $900 for it, but I trusted that they were true to their word. Days went by, more calls to customer service, but still no results. Finally I talked to someone who actually looked into the situation and recognized that the domain name was not available. The person who told me bowstabilizer.com was available had erred. Bowstabilizer.net was a suggested alternative and I accepted it. Finally, after three weeks the web site was finally on line (www.bowstabilizer.net).

I soon realized that even a week after the hosting company submitted my url to the search engines, only on Yahoo was I able to find my site when searching for Compound Bow Rest & Holder, and it was on page four. When I search for a given term I rarely look past the first page for sites. So how do you get traffic to your site? I saw that I had a lot to learn.

Continued on the next post.

Manufacturing the Bow Rest

(I have been laid up with the flu, too sick to do much of anything for the past week, hence the lack of a post.)

In October, 2005 I had contracted to have a 34’x60’ metal building put up for a workshop. This was to free up our basement and garage which was cluttered with snow blower, riding lawn mower, small garden tractor, motorcycle and tools. I had no idea what I was going to do with all that shop space at that time, but I wanted to move into the workshop before winter so I could garage our vehicles. Mother Nature poured frozen water on that plan; two days before a cement pad was to be poured we got eight inches of snow. That put the building on hold until spring.

From my last post you will recall that by the spring time I had decided to manufacture the Compound Bow Rest and Holder myself on a small (500 units) scale and try to market them. The shop building I had already contracted seemed like an ideal “factory”, only a mile from our house. I wanted to have some inventory of the Bow Rest in time for bow hunting season which started October 1. While my shop was being built, I sought sources of supply. My concept at that time was to contract out to have pieces made, and I would basically put the Bow Rests together, paint and package them and they would be ready for shipment. How naïve! The quotes that came back for producing the parts were so high that each Bow Rest would cost me about $100 by the time it was ready to ship. This was more than I could charge, and it left nothing for profit.

When reality set in, the whole tactic changed. I was going to have to manufacture the parts myself, and to do so I would need machines to make the parts consistent and interchangeable. It took the next three months of frenzied activity to first design, and then to build the jigs and machines. Most of them failed to perform satisfactorily as first conceived, and some went through as many as five model changes before being deemed satisfactory. Much more ingenuity and creativity went into this activity than into the invention itself! I gained a new appreciation for those who provide tooling for manufacturing.

The shop building was ready for occupancy about July 20, and after moving in the setting up of tools, jigs and my machines used up August. I hired a friend from our church, a recovering alcoholic who had been dry for 18 months, to help me with production work. The weekend before he was to start he fell off the wagon and did not show up on Monday morning. I stopped at his house to see why and he was falling down drunk. I drove him to a hospital 30 miles away to dry out, but that ended his employment before it started. Fortunately my son came for a month long visit from California shortly thereafter, and between the two of us we were able to make parts for at least 100 Bow Rests. Approximately 20 were assembled, painted and ready to be boxed. We learned by adding up the time for each step in the manufacturing process that I took slightly more than 4 hours to manufacture a boxed bow rest. That is if nothing broke down during the process, which turned out to be a totally unreasonable assumption.

The positive side of doing my own manufacturing was that people were very interested in seeing how the various machines worked. All were powered by muscle, and particularly children had a ball making metal "belt loops", bending loops in 3/16" rod for the spreader, and cutting 1/4" steel rod for the boom. One 12 year old remarked after trying several of the machines, "This is the best day of my life!" Touring the "factory" created a lot of local interest in the Bow Rest.

The costs for raw materials in the manufacture was very reasonable, coming in at around $9.17 per Bow Rest, but the packaging cost even more, $15. This is because two “cookie cutters” for cutting the cardboard box and an insert had to be made. The 8”x48”x2” boxes and inserts themselves cost only $1.20, but when the cost of the cutters was added in the cost per box for a 500 lot was $12. This was discouraging! Putting a label on the boxes with pictures and description would have been another $5.45 per box if done by the box maker. This is because the major cost for the label is setup, and 500 boxes is a very small run. I opted to have self-stick labels printed for $3.25 each and put them on myself. Total cost then for a boxed Bow Rest: approximately $24 plus a half day’s work.

Continued in my next post.