WIRED Store Grand Opening Party

We took a few days to visit New York City this past weekend.



We visited the WIRED Store grand opening on Thursday night and went back on Saturday to get a closer look at everything. The party was crazy! The ground floor had a bar made of ice, and still it was hot from all of the body heat! It's a 3-story structure with lots of little rooms and alcoves. SleepPhones were on the bottom floor, and RunPhones were on the top floor. Lots of people, finger foods, alcohol, and very cool products. Since the party was at 7pm, and we didn't get to eat before, I stood by the food entrance and had a bit of everything.



Here are some pictures of various products. There were lots of retro themes.





While in the City, we met with Dr. Jordan Stern of BlueSleep, the comprehensive sleep center in the financial district. We met with Adil Soomro, a talented Harvard MBA to discuss business. And we visited the 5th Avenue Sleepy's where SleepPhones are offered in New York City. Apparently, SleepPhones are sold out at that location, but they have not been able to get clearance from central purchasing to sell any more yet. We'll keep working with central purchasing!

Podcast Advertising

We decided to support a few really cool podcasts. One is The Classic Tales where a literary piece is read each week. The other is Escape Pod, a weekly science fiction podcast. We sponsored the latest episode of The Classic Tales where B.J. Harrison performs The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens (Episode 136). The three-part story is about Tackleton, a toymaker who hated children. And if a Cricket was ever heard tittering near his hearth, he'd crush it, and relish the jam on the heel of his boot. But for some gentler hearts,the Cricket is a prophet that nudges their minds to brighter days.

Packing Station Organized

Yesterday was a busy SleepPhones day. Jason worked on starting some ad campaigns on Bidvertiser and AdBrite. We found that we were good on Google but not so highly ranked in Yahoo, Bing, or Ask. So we have to ramp up our rankings on those engines.

Due to the more complex nature of our sales now, with multiple options on an item, we have to pack each individually and very carefully. It taking us hours to fulfill orders each night. So I decided to rearrange our packing system. Everything we need is now in one central location and the computer is right there to check orders and listen to Pandora at the same time. I suppose sometimes I might listen to Grammar Girl Podcasts, lectures about business, and world news channels. I'm happy that it's finally all organized in one place. The various components of the packing used to take up the whole house. Here's a picture of Jason looking through the reorganization. We're going to take a break today and go practice archery.

Holiday Season Shopping

The holiday shopping season has started. Our sales this past week have started to increase. Although the competition for customer attention is up during this season, people seem to be more open to spending money. We are ramping up our advertising efforts. In a few weeks, we're sponsoring another episode of Grammar Girl. She's touring the country giving out SleepPhones at each book signing location. We're sending out emails to previous customers and mailing list subscribers. We'll do more promotions on Facebook and Twitter too. Maybe local radio. We tried an ad in Newsweek, which was an expensive flop. Haven't seen much results with RevTwt yet. I'm going to work with a local photographer to get more model pictures with the newest design. As we think of more things, we implement those.

Twitter Giveaway, Magpie, and RevTwt

We set up a Twitter Giveaway in August to draw more attention to us. It has worked out okay from a business point of view. We have 497 Twitter followers right now, most of whom are people who participate in many giveaways to win prizes. We do have many followers who actually are interested in SleepPhones. Some of those people have bought SleepPhones. Since Twitter is a free service, only requiring my time to update, this social media outlet has been a fine marketing strategy after all for giveaways.

But I would really like to make it more valuable. We tried Magpie previously. It's a service that a person could sign up for to make money with their twitter account. Whenever they tweet about a particular topic that an advertiser has signed up for, the service will tweet through their account a ad that pertains to the previous tweet. It was expensive and really didn't bring much traffic at all. And I'm sure at this point, people have figured out how to exploit any loopholes to make the service less valuable for advertisers.

I've just signed up for RevTwt, another Twitter service that is supposed to help bring traffic. I'm going to do a pay-per-click ad. The only gripe I have with it so far is that the money paid in doesn't immediately go into the account. I guess it has to be first moderated by someone. And the ads are also moderated, so I have to wait on that too. We'll see what happens!