These have been done for a while, but I’m finally getting around to posting about them. We decided to go with a new format for our Spring 09 wholesale catalog. As you can see it’s quite rectangular. It’s got 8 glorious pages and feels really nice in your hands. This was a project that wasn’t rushed for once and I think the quality shows through. I did pull a lot of elements from the retail catalog that was designed a few weeks earlier, but this one feels a bit more refined.

I was also able to design a matching business card to go along with the new catalog. Even the banner for the trade show booth matched. Yah for planning!

We have a lot of friends on myspace. At least I consider 7955 a lot. We’ve reached this number without ever adding anyone ourselves. Meaning that all those are people requested to be our friend. It’s a lot of friend requests to deal with in my opinion, but a necessary evil of being on myspace I suppose. (Another reason I love Facebook. No friend requests!) All these friend requests seemed like an untapped gold mine of potential sales. Couldn’t we be directly marketing to these people? They want to be our friends, so they should want to buy jars from us right? With that in mind I set up 150 one time use coupon codes and started messaging users after I accepted their friend requests.

FAIL…as of this posting not one person has used their new friend promotion code. I would have thought maybe a few people would have taken advantage of it, but 0% return??? Something isn’t right. Now I wonder what’s my next step? Should I offer a steeper discount?  What’s the number that people can’t refuse? How low do we want to go?

I’m not sure if I want to abandon the experiment or keep upping the ante. While it’s not incredibly time consuming, it is repetitive and quite tedious. Not to mention never ending, since we get a dozen requests a day. So begins the struggle of balancing what number of sales are worth this project’s time? How deep of discount will we need to offer in order to get people to respond and is it worth offering the discount to get the sale?

What do you think? How good of deal would you need to act?

I want to write here. I really do, but for some reason I’ve hit a wall. It’s not really the lack of material, believe me, I have a lot to say. I suppose I just don’t know where to start.

I guess I’ll start with some recent news…

We just got back from Las Vegas and the Spring CHAMPS trade show. It was nice seeing old friends and making new ones. Which seemed to be the theme of this show. Though let me start in the beginning with the 21 hour drive from Austin to Las Vegas. Not terrible, but not something I think I want to do again. My boney ass just can’t take it. It did give me and my copilot time to talk about a wide range of topics and that’s something that I think we both enjoyed immensely.

The show itself was great. There wasn’t a lot of doom and gloom about the economy. This only reenforces the fact that our industry is somewhat immune to the recession. I believe this is due to a couple of factors. The most important one being the fact that people turn to their vices even more in times of hardship. I think most cannabis enthusiast will give up going out for dinner and cable before they give up smoking their favorite herb. The other reason I think our industry is doing so well is the fact that cannabis is getting a lot of positive press lately. I truly believe that there is a good chance that we’ll see the legal regulation and taxation of cannabis in the next 5-10 years on a national level. Even sooner at a state level. Change is in the air and it smells like sweet, sweet bud.

So needless to say, we wrote a lot of orders, and we’ll be busy for weeks to come. We also became good friends with some people from the MPP (Marijuana Policy Project) and made a few other contact that good pan out into some new products for us later this year. Yes, it’s top secret.

Now that we’re back from the show production and shipping will go into high gear and I’ll be able to start focusing on other projects. The biggest one being our new website. We’re planning a top down redesign of our entire site. I’m really looking to simplify the interface and make it easier to use. Not that it isn’t pretty good now, but we have some ideas that we’d like to implement that will hopefully result in more jar sales. Or at least make us feel better about ourselves.

Sure, Valentine’s day is a fake holiday made up by greeting card companies in order to get you to spend money, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t (or that your girlfriend doesn’t expect something from you) get your loved one something. Forget about flowers and candy and give them a gift that they can use all year around. Order soon to ensure Vday delivery. Make sure to fill it up with something special too!

I’ve been working on updating our new 2009 retail catalog for the past couple months and it’s finally done. This is the catalog that goes out in every order that is placed through our website. We bumped up the page count from 8 to 12 pages this year, so there was a lot more to design. There were a few elements that got carried over from 2008, but mostly everything is new. We’re pretty excited about the addition of the wide mouth jars and new screw top designs. Today I started working on our new wholesale catalog, which will have a lot of elements carried over from this one. Why reinvent the wheel right? Here’s the cover image for the catalog and you can click here to download a low resolution PDF of the entire catalog.

This is a comment we received over the weekend. Most people who order leave comments for us (we send extra goodies for doing so). This has to be one of the best ones we’ve received in a while. People love our products!

“After becoming very upset with all the “Above the Influence” commercials I’ve been seeing lately. So I searched on Google to see if there was an anti above the influence website, and low and behold i came across above the ignorance.org which had some great info and a link to your site right up front! after reading that site for a bit, I took a look at your site, and found myself EXTREMELY jealous of your jobs haha. So I read up on the company, and immediately felt that buying a jar from you, is not only good for me (I get an awesome sealed jar) but is good for all of herb smokers, especially those as productive as you all have been. So thank you very much for setting up this wonderful company, hopefully you guys will continue to expand and have fun while doing so. Have a good day, and thank you once again.”

So Gravitron has the front cover for the trade magazine and you ask, “what about 420 Science?”, well fear not, we’re on the back cover. Which in my opinion is way better. There are no restrictions on the back. It’s all about us. This spring we’re debuting way too many new jars. It’s really quite absurd. 2 new classic sizes and we’re making six of our classic designs available on the black screw top jars. That’s over 50 new jars that we’re going to carry. I really don’t know where they’re all going to go. Good thing we have a bigger warehouse here in Austin.

In addition to having the back cover, we’re also going to be running an ad inside the magazine too. Typically we do one or the other, but being that it’s the trade show issue, we wanted to make sure we had a big presence. This ad represents a new direction for us. We decided to take the space and write a little something about ourselves. We’ve been doing this crazy business for nearly 5 years now and we wanted to take the opportunity to say something directly to our customers and hopefully get some new ones out of it. Both Matt and I really like the blue cloud graphic up at the top. I think that theme will be making it’s way into our new catalogs. Though I guess that’s really where it started. Right now I’m working pretty diligently on finishing our new retail catalog. Hopefully that’ll get done in the next day or 2 and I can showcase it here in the weeks to come.