Here's your Friday Ramble!

Last chance to order before Christmas soon...

Hello people of the internet! I’m Ross, and I’ll be totally honest with you, I’m very tired of writing 😂 If you want a little bit of a peak behind the curtain, we’re trying to work on our “email marketing” flows. But let’s be honest, most businesses send really shit, boring emails. Like some of the ones I get basically go “do you want to buy something?” followed up with “how about now?”

And that’s it.

But I want every single email you get off us to either be informative, interesting, funny, or at least worth opening. I might fail miserably at doing any of that, but I do try.

Like they always say you need one of those abandoned cart emails. You know the ones. You add stuff to your basket, run away, and then a few hours later the business goes “don’t forget to checkout!”

For YEARS I’ve refused to do them. Simply for the same reason I refused to run Facebook ads: I never wanted to be intrusive.

I still feel a little bit like that now. But I also understand that it’s very hard to run a business if you refuse to show yourself to people 😂

Unfortunately you can’t just hide in the corner and hope people find you, or rely on the wonderful algorithms of social media. So you need to do emails and other things to simply get seen.

To be fair, in our cart abandoned email I at least put a link to our Spotify playlist which I update quite regularly with songs I currently like. Any sensible business would say that’s a terrible idea. Why would you want to direct someone’s attention away from what they MIGHT buy and put them somewhere else instead?

Umm… because I’m Ross and I want to show people some cool songs? Jeez.

Oh, here it is…

16 people actually have this one saved, which I think is cool.

If I’m totally honest, I could fill this with Enter Shikari at the moment. But fear not, I haven’t.

If you happen to be LOVING something right now then feel free to let me know. I like finding new stuff. If you’re a rock/metal fan and you’re digging some band no one has ever heard of, then I’m all ears to find out about them!

Last Christmas Orders…

Right, there’s the excessively long intro done. Now to talk about Christmas I guess?

So Royal Mail has the last posting date as December 20th for Tracked 48. Which I think is waaaaay too last minute.

Trust be told, if you want your best chance to have something before Christmas you’re better off ordering this weekend.

Don’t worry, if you’re not in the market for Christmas presents then that’s fine. We’ll actually be keeping the website open over the entire Christmas period, but we will be slower. I wanna say Kath’s last day in work is December 16th… then you just have me and Rachel sending stuff until… Sometime after Christmas? What’s your annual leave Kath? I don’t even know 😂

To be honest, Rachel is in charge of staffing and the unit stuff. I just tell her the budget for wages 😂

So we might not even be able to get much sent on the 20th of December, so I’d highly recommend ordering BEFORE then, or at least don’t be coming up to me going “OH WHERE’S MY ORDER!?” when you ordered on the 21st.

Anyway… if you happen to want to order then I’ll give you a button…

I’ll be honest, we haven’t massively poured much this week. I think it was mainly the Wizard of Oz ones again, and then making up a BUTT LOAD of sample boxes. Oh, and we got the subscription boxes poured and sent out too.

I dare say we won’t really be pouring new stuff until the new year.

Behind the Scenes Stuff…

Most of my work lately has been behind the scenes stuff that you likely won’t see for a while.

So myself and Sharmane have been working on the emails. I probably have… maybe 20-30 hours left on that. Then I’ve had to do TWO designs for boxes - one for the Mystery Box and one for the Subscription Box.

Sometimes I try to look at all the things we do, and just wonder how we can make them better.

Someone emailed the other day saying they were disappointed with the packing, and that they felt like they just had Teddy Pots chucked in a bag and it didn’t feel like it was packed with care. It didn’t help that we also somehow forget their thank you card, which we very rarely do.

It also didn’t help that they saw that silly packing video I did where I pack an order and I iron the tissue paper and all that silly stuff 😂

But yeah… I did kinda think that the smaller orders perhaps don’t look as nice? We do just use regular padded envelopes after all. Not that we have many options. But I have designed a new padded envelope so we’ll be using those at some point in 2025 - these things take a while to actually produce.

So that’s the outside of the subscription box on the left, the one side of the padded envelope in the middle, and then the top of the Mystery box on the right.

I wanted the full rainbow style on the padded envelope but you pay PER COLOUR so a rainbow would be a LOT. And they said they probably wouldn’t be able to realistically do it anyway, so I left it.

I have thought about having a custom delivery box too, and then how it’s all presented in there, but the main problem is that our orders vary so wildly in size.

Like if all we sold was trainers, we could probably have a set size box that we used 90% of the time. But if I went out and designed a postal box I’d have no idea what size to go for.

But yeah… I’ve been thinking about this stuff WAY too much lately. I guess I just want the full experience to be as good as possible.

Next up on my list is the thank you cards… But I want to get the emails sorted first 😂

If you ever have suggestions…

Please let us know if you ever see anything that you think we could change, or improve on.

Whether it’s something on the website or the packaging.

We are also in the process of coding the wish list on the website too!

So once that’s sorted you’ll be able to “heart” things and then have a wish list on your account. It’s something people have asked for quite a few times but I’ve never gotten around to doing it. At least once it’s active you’ll be able to add the things you want to order at some point. I know we do a LOT of things, so it’ll be easier for you to keep them all together.

Once I’m up the unit more often I’ll be able to be a lot better at this sort of thing. Hopefully anyway. No excuses then anyway, which is how I’d prefer it.

But that’s it for this week!

Sorry I don’t have more cool stuff for you this week, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

I’ll catch you all again next week!

Much love,

Ross & Rachel x