Lessons Learned – The Make or Break Decision

Getting back to my series of lessons learned while making money, it is time I dove in to the biggest lesson provider and money making adventure of my life so far.

It was in 1991 when I got started making primarily one of a kind pieces of artsy furniture. A couple years later, fed up at making $5 an hour making art and sick of working in restaurants to pay the bills, I began to transition away from making high end furniture to making small and more affordable home decor objects.

I began to learn the basic lessons of retail commerce. For example, I found that the lower the price the more units I could sell. This was partly due to the economics and partly due to me being the worst natural sales person in the world; therefore I began to specialize in low priced items which were in the impulse purchase price range of below $30.

One of the ideas I had was to make photo frames [don't forget this is the early - mid 1990's when people still printed out photos]. Photo frames at the time were all pretty much brown stained wood. The ones I came up with at first were my own hand whittled versions of what was already available.

Lesson Number One – Market Feedback

The first big lesson began to occur when I first displayed the frames on my table at the Vancouver Public Market. The lesson is that there is nothing in the world fantastic as market research with a live audience for product development.

All you have to do is listen and they’ll tell you exactly what you need to do to be successful. I guess you also need a thick enough skin to be able to handle the people who are abusive or insensitive and to be able to carry on when it feels bad…but if you can weather that, then the feedback is awesome.

As soon as I put my frames out for public consumption, people began to buy them. They would beg me to sell my prototypes and half-finished duct-taped samples. They practically wouldn’t take no for an answer!

The other amazing thing that happened, over and over, is that they kept asking me if I would paint them bright colors. They wanted bright red, yellow, green and blue photo frames!

How bizarre I thought, but having the paints already at hand I from my artsy furniture period, I began to comply.

Sales went through the roof. I remember at a craft show in Toronto, the biggest and most competitive one in Canada I believe, I had a line of 15 people, each with an arm load of my frames. I couldn’t resist, even though I was sieged trying to take payments and wrap purchases, to just stop for a minute and drink in the feeling of that crazy demand for my product.

During one 30 day period I worked 14 hour days, 7 days a week and made over $30,000 in sales. Not bad for a one man operation.

Could it Get Any Better?

It turns out it could. At a major craft show there are not only public buyers, but store buyers who are looking for cool and new merchandise for their stores.

One after another, small shop owners approached me wanting to order my photo frames. That was great, but then a buyer for a major retail store came a long and wanted to place an order to put my frames in 50 stores! And that was just a starter, or trial order!

In my head I did the math and that was a really nice big number she was offering to purchase. However I also did the math of my time, and that’s where my mental circuits began to fry. It just wasn’t possible. I had to pass up on the bonanza.

The Result of Saying No

In the next year funky photo frames exploded into retail stores and companies like Umbra stepped in to fill the need. Three years later Ikea was selling knock-offs and another year after that I saw a reasonably similar version of my original photo frame at a dollar store for $2 [mine had been $20].

Through some magic of luck and timing I was at the absolute exact right place at the exact right time with the exact right product, but I couldn’t cash in.

What’s the Real Lesson?

Looking back of course I wish that I had borrowed money, fired up a factory and begun to pump out as many of my frames as possible. Being the first to mass market a new product concept like that would have been a huge money making opportunity. No doubt about it.

But was it reasonable that a young guy with training as an artist and no business experience and no contacts could scale up something like that?

I don’t think so, that isn’t the lesson. In my reality it really was impossible to go from were I was at to a company of the kind of size that would be needed to fully leverage that opportunity.

The lesson learned, and it is a big one, was that I should have asked for help or advice. In my brain it was impossible, because I asked the question:

“Can I quadruple my production when I’m already working 14 hours a day?”

Clearly the answer to that question is no.

The right question was:

“How can I quadruple my production when I’m already working 14 hours a day?”

If I had asked myself the second question rather than the first, then I would have answered, “I don’t know.”

Then I could have asked other people, people who had experience with things like that. I could have kept asking it until someone helped me move forward…but I didn’t and now looking back it is sad to me that I chose to retreat from that opportunity.

The big lessons in this story are, ask the right questions and ask them to the right people. If you are creating a product, ask your customers what they want.

If you have a business opportunity, ask business people.

A valuable set of lessons, even though I continue to struggle when it comes to seeking help, I can say that I do get it now and that it is impossible to accomplish very much while hanging on to the concept of being an island.

What questions do you wish you had asked?

Have you ever missed out on a killer opportunity? If so, what lessons did you learn? I’d really like to know I’m not alone on this

Story Links:

• See the River City Decor website in Archive.org – images of my products included. No, I don’t have any clue where the yellow “Click Here Now” stuff came from. My site had a white background.
• One of a Kind Show – Canada’s largest craft show.
• Granville Island Public Market

- Jon Symons

P.S. this article is a part of my “Ways I’ve Made Money” series.

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