When you do what we do, you tend to live in the future and don’t appreciate the now as much as we probably should. Right now, we’re thinking about Christmas which approaches quicker than you know. As I write it’s just 78 days away and effectively 10 days less than that because the printers usually give a 10 day period to clear all orders.
It’ll be our 26th Christmas, planning has to start now or things can get out of control quite easily as trade doubles and even triples. It’s not so bad these days because we don’t run any ads because they can run out of control quickly and cost you a fortune, it’s more about planning designing, website changes and newsletters.
We work to a grid so that we always know where we are. A lot of companies will discount heavily for Black Friday/Cyber Monday and you’re encouraged to do so or expected to do so by many platforms but just to be clear, we won’t be. Prices of everything have gone up radically this year and we have had to raise prices to America to cope and UK/Europe too and I don’t think it’ll end there. So there’s just no margin to allow cutting for a day or a week.
I think the situation is understood by most customers. It might mean we can’t compete on price with the Chinese/Far East/transglobal businesses but there’s no point in even trying really. The quality of many of those sites is often poor and service/communication non-existent.
Where they can never compete with us is in passion, knowledge and understanding of the music. It’s all just products to those places. They wouldn’t know Budgie from a budgie. I know some people along the way in the last 26 years have advised us that such an attitude is superfluous to requirements. That it’s all about product. But that under appreciates the driving motivation behind the whole business. It’s not just products to me, it’s a lifelong passion. Plus the website is just as much about content and my blogs. They aren't there just for algorithmic reasons.
It may be just early October but now that the planning is done, I’m already thinking about what to do in January!
