This year has been a wild ride for a whole lot of companies. Our business decided to pivot how it does work and many of us in our line of work started doing internal marketing. This means that we have had to purchase lot of our own packaging supplies and have gone through a wild ride of price and how we were able to accomplish lowering our costs. It has all been due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and we are trying to cut costs and stay successful. This is a hard thing to do and part of it is simply trying new things and learning to work on our time spent on projects. For the marketing side, we went through a big process to figure out the supplies we would need to take on the task of internal marketing. The first thing we had to do was decide what was the most effective marketing projects in our past. Cost and time are going to be the deciding factor and all of that has to be based on the success of the projects. This means that we have to go through all the marketing reports of the past and decide rather the digital or the physical campaigns were the most successful and which ones will cost the most and take the most time to implement. Once we went through all of our records we found that the hand-delivered or mailed platforms that we used gave us the most successful in sales for the least amount of cost. So we decided to then start working on taking those campaigns and doing them in house. The first thing we needed was supplies. So we ordered cardboard boxes, tape, paper, and labels to get the whole thing started. We printed and designed our first campaign and then we took note of each and every step. We counted the cardboard boxes, and the strips of tape and the time it took to accomplish a set amount of each campaign. This was a terrible painstaking process and we knew it was not going to be fun. We filled many excel spreadsheets with data and finally, we were able to get actual costs of what it took to make our marketing in house. Then we knew we could cut down on the processes and also the products we used. My next goal was to call up all the major providers of packaging supplies and find out how we could cut costs and get the best advice on products to use. This was a wise choice because I was able to find different products to use that allowed us to buy less and work faster. Tape for instance was one. We were using 6 strips of tape for each marketing gift. It was because the tape was not strong enough to do it all in two strips. So with the advice of our packaging supplies representative, I ended up getting thicker tape which was less expensive in the long run and took less time to put on the boxes. Hence, our costs lowered dramatically in that way. I was also able to price shop and bid against these big companies. It allowed us to get deals on bulk purchases and our marketing costs lowered even further. We are now on the way to success and have a competitive advantage against our competition.
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This year has been a little different then most. The pandemic had me spending a whole lot of time at home doing projects and also moving people. I have never purchased so much packing tape, wood, and cardboard boxes in my life. But what really took my attention was two very different but really cool home projects. I found that when I had extra time on my hands and that I was going to be stuck at home that it was really nice to accomplish fun goals every few weeks at home. This pandemic I ended up making a live edge coffee table and also took two sets of deer antlers from past years and made them home decorations. SO I want to go through some of the processes and give some ideas for taking your random home projects and making your pandemic a little less bland. My first task was to take this really old and beat up slab of wood in my garage and make something fun out of it. Originally it was a pretty bad slab and it had dead and rotted wood all over it. I knew a good portion of it still looked fresh. Just a heads up deadwood is flaky, wont take any wood treatment at all and will simply break off with any weight on it. So I had to work really hard to separate those sections from the main piece. This was done by taking a chisel, hammer and a knife. Those tools and many hours took the majority of the bad pieces off the table. The end process was that a 3x6 foot table ended up getting trimmed down to 2x4 feet. After that I had to sand it for hours. I did this with a circulation sander and also lots of hand sanding. This took another two evenings of work to get it all smoothed out and to get the remainder of the dead wood off. The live edge turned out to be a wild and beautiful mix due to all the sanding and chiseling. It made the piece really unique. Then I had to protect it and used multiple coats of polyurethane. I sanded in-between each layer and in the end the wood table looks amazing. The next project was a bit more involved. I had two sets of buck deer antlers that I had taken in the past. I originally only went hunting for the meat but decided to keep the antlers in hopes of hanging them some day. It turns out that the skull cap that was attached was a whole lot of work. The antlers were still partly attached to the skull which had been cut. This also still had dear fur and brain matter all over it. To my surprise this is a very hard process to remove all the fur and brain matter. I started by getting a large pot and boiling the antlers for hours. Then I had to pull off all the fur and brain matter. This literally took hours because it is so hard to do. I then got a bleach and let them sit in it for a day. Then I bough a deodorize and all the while lining my garage with layers of cardboard boxes to protect the floor and keep smells contained. Then finally I was able to cut the skull cap down to fit in a mount for the wall. It took about 15 hours of total time to finish that project, which under normal circumstances I would not be able to do. But the pandemic allowed me extra time and motivation to make cool things by hand. It has been one interesting year for my family and I. We decided to move from a nice inner city apartment to a home fairley close to our favorite city. It was a wild idea that ended up with us moving into a fixer upper home. Even though we ended up with three times the space of our apartment we found out that we had less space than ever. This sounds extremely counter intuitive but when you are renovating a home while living in it so much clutter occurs that it is wild. The real problem was trying to find some sense of order when it comes to living in the home and we found that most of the house was turned into a project. We had tools and wood and shelves all over. There was alwayse multiple rooms filled with some kind of paint drying or woof being stained. So we needed an answer to all this mess and we had to find a way to organize it all. What we ran into was simply using what we had available. There was no reason to go out and create a new project just to attempt to work on the clutter. This is where we found out that the best idea was to use vertical space instead of spreading things out. We also decided to create a number system to make that vertical system not be annoying. We ended up getting all the cardboard boxes that we had used to move and placed them together. We worked on sizing them all from large to small and then getting a stackable system in place. We numbered all of these from 1 to 5 because we could get five boxes tall in the home. Then we decided to label them by what object would go in them and how often we would need to use them. So for tools like hammers, and screwdrivers we put a 1 on them because we would use these the most. That also meant that they would get stacked on top of the pile of boxes on the number 1 spot. This allowed us to not get annoyed at having to unstack 4 other boxes to get to a item that we would use very often. Cardboard boxes may have not been the most ideal way to organize our home, but with all the constant dust and work and things getting bumped into we didn't want to buy a nice system and let it get ruined. Besides with all the paint and fumes we didn't want a wood racking system soaking up smells that would never go away. It was wonderful to organize all of our things and give ourselves almost two more rooms to be able to not look like a construction zone. The small mental savings by giving ourselves more space was the best thing we could have done. It looks like we gave ourselves a whole new apartment worth of room by simply using what we had available to us. So if you are going to be moving and are even trying to do work in an attic the numbering system and labeling was a huge help to us and once we decided what we used the most it helped us not get frustrated by the storage system. |
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September 2017
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