tash wong

Weeks 46 - 50

As you can imagine, November and December are the busiest times for anyone who sells something that could be a holiday gift, and Coastermatic is no exception. Yesterday was our last day to buy Photo Coasters, and the last day for free shipping. You can still get Designer Sets express shipped (until 12/22), and gift cards come via email, but for the most part I consider us done for the year.

YAY.

A lot of work went in to preparing for holiday season this year. It's Coastermatic's 4th Christmas (crazy huh?), and I've learned a lot along the way. This year, I was lucky enough to have the help of an amazing outreach team.

Here's a taste of the projects they worked on to get ready:

July - August Hannah reached out to about 40 different print magazines over the summer. We made a special coaster for each person, wrote them a note, and sent it all in sparkly pink mailers. Thanks to her help we ended up in 3 print publications: Draft, NY Magazine, and Bust Magazine!

Sam and Victoria reached out to about 100 photographers on Instagram, spreading the word about Coastermatic. A few of those people loved our coasters and told their audiences about us.

Sept - December Sam started working on our Pinterest presence. None of us knew much about how to use the platform as a brand, but she dove in to become our Pinterest Princess. Starting with just a handful of boards, Sam has grown our following from nothing to 250 followers, thousands of gorgeous pins to look through, and a bunch of repins of Coastermatic content.

Victoria became our Instagram Aficionado. She hosted 12 weeks of giveaways, took some amazing photos of coasters in Boston, and improved our Instagram following and engagement by leaps and bounds. What was once 1000 followers is now 1470!

Hannah became our resident writer, taking over our blog and email newsletter with her animated voice. Thanks to her, our newsletter and blog finally found a weekly consistency. We experimented with post types and found our readers are much more interested in stories about Coastermatic than straight commercial style emails. Oh, and our email list grew by over 200!

Daryl did some amazing work reaching out to over 300 Youtube vloggers. She was successful in getting us into 3 Christmas gift guides, and we look forward to being featured on a number of other channels in early 2016.

Look! I made a video for Coastermatic. 

It’s all sparkles today at Coastermatic.com!

Join us for 30% off the entire store. Test out our new Photo Upload feature with our Photo Coasters, or browse our new range of Designer coaster sets. 

Week 43 - 45

Best Worst

Last week I gave a condensed version of the Typo talk at Social Print Studio. It was for a new speaker series by Makeshift Society called Best Worst. It was a wonderful night - I spoke along side 3 incredibly talented people who shared their stories of good projects gone wrong. Big thanks to Rena Tom and Ashely Rose for making the evening a success.

Holiday Halloween's over, so that means HOLIDAYS. Draft Magazine just sent me a copy of their latest magazine, and Coastermatic is in the gift guide! It's very exciting to see us in print! We're looking forward to being featured in Bust Magazine, and hoooopefully Country Living. CL requested samples for photography for their gift guide back in August, said that they loved the coasters, but has so far refrained from actually confirming we'll be in the magazine. FINGERS CROSSED, they sell about 1.5 million of those mags month.

What's next PHOTO UPLOAD!!! We've been working on it for a couple of months now, and it's almost ready to go live. I'm putting the finishing touches on it, and hopefully it'll be up for a test drive later today.

Photo Pairs? I'd like to build the ability to buy a pair of coasters. This would drop our opening price point to $29, and offers an alternative for people who may want to buy coasters as a nice stocking stuffer. It'd also be helpful for us on the promotional side - comping a pair of coasters costs half as much as a full set of 4. However, I'm realizing that adding this product means redesigning the homepage, and I'm not sure if I have the resources to do it over the next few weeks. Time will tell.

Week 41-42

Marketing! Getting traction for Coastermatic has always been a challenge. It turns out that when you make something, people don’t automatically flock to it. Over the past year, I’ve tried all kinds of things: social media, blogging, speaking, email marketing, ads, etc etc. Nothing has consistently worked, and I often feel like I’m shooting in the dark.

Recently, I’ve begun to get some clarity - YAY. Data, experimentation, focus, and funnels are now terms that actually make sense and I’m starting to build on. I found a couple of resources recently that’s helped make everything click: Hiten Shah, and a book called Traction.

Hiten is the co-founder of KissMetrics, and has given a few amazing talks about digital marketing. I found his talk, Lean Analytics (slides), super insightful. He walks through a formula for experimentation and uses case studies to express how each step worked. Said formula is the scientific method, so nothing new there, but the way he talks through it is what I’ve been looking for.

Traction is a book that was re-released recently. It’s a shallow book that covers a wide range of topics. As I read the intro, I thought - where was this 3 years ago! The first few chapters give you permission to be crap at marketing (turns out it’s hard for nearly everyone), and then gives you a framework to figure out what type of marketing to focus on. The rest of the book are short chapters on 19 different types of online and offline marketing. They’re very quick chapters, but it’s nice to have a high level overview of so much in 1 book.

Moving ahead, Coastermatic is focusing on press and holiday reviews, and also building a solid social media presence to show how awesome we are to all of the people who will find us through said reviews. Curious? Check us out on Instagram and Pinterest, or join our mailing list!  

Manufacturer visit

A couple of weeks ago, I made the trip out to visit the coaster factory! It was fantastic to see the team who make the coasters again, and work through a bunch of production questions. Here’s a couple photos from the trip - a box of CM labels, and the so-to-be new coaster press. 

Finally, it has happened to me Someone in Asia completely ripped off Coastermatic. I’ll refrain from giving you their name, cause lord knows they don’t deserve attention. I heard about them a few weeks ago, and was very surprised to discover that they’d used 100% of our selection flow, js, html, images and all! I quickly learned the extent of my rights, and it turns out that I can sue, amongst other things.

Instead of doing that, I reached out to them to let them know we welcome competition (there are a lot of tables in this world), but we don’t take kindly to our code being copied and that they needed to take it down. To my surprise, they actually did…for a week. When the site popped back up, they’d simply updated class names and hidden their js a bit better. But, it’s still the UI Tom and I built and designed. *sigh*

Weeks 38-40

September ended up being a month of settling in and getting organized. After a summer of being all over the place, it was no surprise that many of my project management systems were in crazy disarray.

One thing I did was get clear on quarterly goals, as well as planning for October. I also tidied up my desk and set up workspace where I could be reminded of goals and things that make me happy. Here’s how it looked last week:

On the left are all of my planning docs: quarterly, monthly, weekly worksheets are on the bottom, with annual plans, priorities and core practices I want to be reminded of above. On the right, I have a few pictures of where I want to be in the future, namely traveling around the world and having an awesome cabin in the woods :).

I also updated my weekly project planner. I found the time based approach of my past schedules was making me very stressed out. For example, if an urgent email came through, and made me miss a block of time I’d assigned to something else, I’d feel dejected and rushed for the rest of the day. In response, I’ve updated my worksheet to this:

It’s focused on core tasks to achieve, rather than when during the day to do them. Column 1 is weekly objectives and notes, 2 is for appointments, and 3 is for daily tasks I can realistically get done. A bad habit of mine is to have a list of 10-15 things I want to get done in a day, and then to feel bad because I don’t do them all. This week, only listing 4-5 tasks, I’ve ended my days feeling accomplished. BONUS.

Finally, I’ve been drowning in email for the last few months. Drowning in email is pretty stressful, so I set out to find systems to help me process and reply in an efficient way. I found this post by Andreas Klinger that utilizes multiple inboxes in Gmail. I sunk about 4 hours into implementation and clean up on Sunday for both my personal and Coastermatic accounts. This week, I’ve successfully hit inbox zero several times, and have a good awareness about what emails need to be actioned on and when.

Weeks 30 - 37

It's been an intense summer, hence the radio silence here on the blog, but lots of awesome stuff is happening. Here's the high level on the past few weeks:

Week 30 - Spoke at General Assembly in SF, and hired 3 interns

Week 31 - Went to Melbourne, saw a David Bowie retrospective (amazing!)

Week 32 - Went to Brisbane, my sister got married, practiced managing interns from another country

Week 33 - Started working on an illustrator licensing agreement with Chuck from February 13 Creative

Week 34 - Houzz.com wants to sell our sets! Went to Washington, signed on with Akou Consulting to build Photo Upload

Week 35 - Finally back! NY Now orders + press attention started coming in, Intern feedback sessions + continuation plans

Week 36 - Decided we need part time help, set up test mobile store with Modest

Week 37 - Released the 2015 Collection!!!! Hired Daryl, our new Sales Assistant, built some order systems.

I’m looking forward to being a little more open with my process for the rest of the year. SO much is happening, it’s exciting. The Coastermatic Team is now 6 people strong! 

A lot has been going on lately, and it's been keeping me from The Schedule. But, life is about learning to roll with things, even when external events throw you out of sync. Here's quick round up of what's been going on with me:

Weddings! Last weekend was Dave's brother's wedding. It was just outside of Eugene, Oregon, and it was a great time had by all. Next week we're off to Australia for my sister's wedding. She's the first of my siblings to marry, so it's very exciting.

Photoshoots! We had a photoshoot on Monday with Sarah Deragon of Portraits to the People, and stylist Brittany Bijan of Harlin and Sparrow. And OH MY those are some talented ladies. The photo above is one of the preview shots from the day, featuring the new succulent coaster set. I'm super excited to get the rest of the photos back, and am working through how/when to release the new 2015 collection. 

Interns! The intern search was a success! Last week, I interviewed and hired 3 amazing people: Victoria Romulo, Sam Lau, and Hannah Fuller. I'm very excited to work with them, I think we'll learn a lot from each other. We're a remote team and are experimenting with using Slack and Asana for the bulk of our communications, I'll let you know how it goes.

How did I find awesome interns? (I've been asked this a few times) First, I asked everyone who applied to write ~400 words on a self directed project they'd done, and explain it from start to finish. Because we're a remote team, knowing that someone was capable of both completing a self directed project AND being articulate about it was really important to me. Second, I ran a very targeted Facebook ad for a few days. I figured it'd serve me better than Craigslist, since I could target an age group, location, as well as use of smart phones, being an early tech adopter. It was also cheaper than Craigslist. *bonus*

Talks! I delivered the my "becoming a creative entrepreneur" talk a couple of times in July. Once at SVAIxD and again last night at General Assembly SF. Both occasions gave me an opportunity to review the material again, practice speaking to different types of groups, and reflect on a few of the hurdles I've encountered along the way.

I love giving this talk - it's fantastic to hear stories from audience members who share their bumpy roads to success. Knowing that there are others out there who are building businesses, despite the hardships along the way, makes this whole journey a lot more rewarding.

In lieu of something more thought out, here's a bit of an email I wrote to a friend on Tuesday night:

My east coast trip was amazing - on the plane back now. I met up with heaps of people, old friends, new friends, Coastermatic friends, and gave the talk again. I get so much energy out of connecting with people - it's something I miss a lot in SF. (Though, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I look forward to some quiet work time when I get back.)

Highlights:

I met with the American Design Club guys (sales reps), and they're as excited with me as I am with them. I'm starting to find people to work with, and it's great. Like the "I need to do everything myself" voice is starting to soften.  

After 2 weeks of no intern applications, I got some feedback that the Photoshop component was scaring people away, so I removed it, and now have 3 amazing applicants! I'll batch out the photoshop work to a specialist I'll find via UpWork. 

The prospect of having to reject at least one of these people is poking at my "always be a likable lady" programming, but I'm ready to start moving past that. 

I met up with the Freshkills Parks Director of Communications - there's a project I worked on in 2012 that received an NEA grant, and now the NYC Parks Dept is looking for a site to install. One part will be installed in August, and will be a public installation until July 2016, while the rest is set to be installed this time next year. It's very exciting to be a part of something like this: 

Freshkills Park will be the Central Park of the next generation, and a model to future parks around the world.

They're taking a lot of photos of the site as it evolves. Photos that could one day make fabulous coasters.

Blog post is a tad late this week - I’m bopping around the Northeast seeing friends, having meetings, and other adventures. I’m also still looking for interns — so if you have friends active in the undergrad design community, please pass the intern post along. 

This past weekend I went to Solid Sound. It's a music festival hosted by Wilco and MassMOCA (a contemporary art museum) in North Adams, Massachusetts. It was 3 days of being outside, with lots of people, surrounded by art and music. It rained a bit, but that's a novelty for those of us who live in California.

I'm not at all familiar with Wilco's catalog, or many of the artists who performed. For me, the festival was an exploration into a very specific segment of American culture, that I'm very much on the fringes of.

Since the music couldn't take me back to memories of past parties and friends, I found myself thinking a lot about the systems involved in putting a 3 day show together:

Where do the stages come from?

Who organizes the food vendors and volunteers?

How many people does it take to pull something like this off?

What kind of economic impact does this have on the surrounding community?

How does Wilco/Tweedy sustain an audience large enough to get 15,000 come out for a 3 day festival (in the rain)?

What kind of revenue is generated by ticket and merch sales?

How much beer was sold?

At one point, we happened across a Patagonia truck. 2 guys were there offering repairs on Patagonia gear. They told us about how they're driving across the country to support "grass roots" events like Solid Sound, to follow along with their adventure blog, AND add in our own stories.

This me wondering: Where's the line between extremely focused marketing (for the more cynical out there - manipulative pandering) and authentic conversation? How will these things blend in the future?

I'm starting to play with very focused marketing efforts of my own and have noticed that negotiating the line between authentic connection and opportunistic marketing is a fine one. 

As some of you may know, I'm on the look out for a couple of interns. It's the first time I've hired anyone for Coastermatic that isn't a professional consultant, and -like everything- figuring out how to do it has been a learning process.

Why hire? One of the summer goals for Coastermatic is to increase our audience on Instagram. I plan to do this by sharing coasters with people who's audience would find Coastermatic interesting. While fun, this kind of research, outreach, and content creation takes time, time that I'd like to spend getting the 2015 Collection done as well as adding new features to CM.com.

Why interns? I'm looking for help with something very specific that a couple of people could get done in 5-10 hours a week. Given the feedback to my talk back in April, I know there are a fair few people who are curious about creative entrepreneurship. Positioning this role as an entry level internship opens the door to those who want to see how a company like Coastermatic is run, without a massive commitment.

Other things... Thinking about bringing people in has stirred up a lot of memories of my own past work experiences, and my desire to create a positive, fun, work culture with in Coastermatic as it grows. I know there’ll be things I get right, and things I get wrong, and I’m hoping that so long as I’m conscious about and encourage clear lines of communication, it’ll all pan out ok. Here goes!

A lot happened last week, I went to Hawaii to spend some time with my family, I found a sales rep to take Coastermatic to a few trade shows, and I got engaged to David Bellona!

Life is crazy and exciting.

This week is basically catch up on last - I've got mountains of email to get through, and am thinking it's time to create a system so I can have someone help me do this. Do you have any tips on how to outsource email management? Lemme know.

I'm also creating a bunch of coaster sets, which is a lot of fun. I've enlisted the help of April Walters, Sarah Adams, Liz Tan, and David Bellona to help me get the 2015 Coastermatic Collection together. The Brooklyn based American Design Club will be representing Coastermatic at the Las Vegas Market and NY Now. The first batch of 6 sample sets went off to the printer last night, and there are a few more in the works. I'll post photos of them on the Coastermatic instagram account, so check that out if you'd like to follow along with their progress. If all goes well, you'll be able to find Coastermatic coasters in stores across the country come October.