Presently Preparing for Products

I've long said that one of the best ways to sell more stuff is to have more stuff to sell. Typically, I'm using this line to encourage someone to focus some of their effort on catalog development, as larger catalogs (at least to me) are easier to merchandise and market than smaller ones. It's one of the few big advantages of retail over DtC, as it's generally easier to find another existing product to add than it is to do the product development of bringing a new one to market.

Of course, when your catalog sits at zero, the goal is really to get to one.

Luckily, we were able to navigate the chicken-and-egg issues around attracting the first vendor, knowing it's far easier to get the second one to return your calls, and that effect snowballs from there, especially if the site is actually launched, and people can see it.

Well, with significant signs of life on the distribution and fulfillment front, I've started laying out some other supporting logistics. There are two major parts of this effort that I'm rolling into a single physical space:

• Return Center: As I will be working with dropshippers (especially in the first year), they obviously would prefer not to see products come back to them, and their restocking fees and condition requirements imply that pretty clearly. As such, I've learned that it helps to have your own return center to process returns from customers. You can accept products outside of what the distributor would accept (and seek other resolutions as appropriate, case by case), and you can still choose to return appropriate units to the distributor if needed. Distributors like seeing that kind of legwork, too, as you might imagine.
• Product Photography Studio: The internet is a visual medium, and pool equipment is notoriously thin on attractive product photos. There are some retailers producing pretty good video content, but I'm still seeing a scattering of photos I remember our team taking over 15 years ago that remain the best visual for those products to this day. I'll already be set up to bring products in and out with the Return Center, so by finding a space that can support both, I can set up a pretty productive little space! Plus, manufacturers and distributors like to see this kind of investment, too, as it proves we're not just another fly by night marketplace arbitrage parasite.

Want to see a perfect example of how much of a difference photography can make? See for yourself! Here are a couple of photos of a Petair EC-011057 pool pump, including one taken over a decade ago before Leslie's acquired PoolSupplyWorld, and one from the manufacturer's page for the same item.

It's no wonder that so many people mistook our photos for the manufacturer's! To be fair, Pentair's job is to make good pumps, so that leaves the opportunity for good media to their retailers. Challenge accepted, yet again. I may not be as skilled as the photographers we had back in the day, but I picked up a few tricks from them, so I should be good enough (for now).

And so, with photography on the mind, and after almost a decade of working exclusively from home, I am leasing a physical space! Commercial real estate is pretty arcane, tedious, and sometime silly, so I'm not counting my chickens before they hatch. I either have a great little warehouse space (under 1000 sqft) ready for signing shortly, or at least a very good idea of what I'd be looking for if I had to go fishing for the next candidate.

Meanwhile, as I wrap my head around just how many jobs I have (for now), I also upgraded to ChatGPT Pro, which gave me access to Operations--the agent that can browse the internet and perform a bunch of types of tasks for you. I've been playing with it for just a day, now, and it certainly has promise. I'm still learning how to get the most out of it, but it seems already able to handle most things that I'd ask of an intern with a Chromebook. If I'd signed up a day earlier, I might have saved several hours of manual research on the photo gear kit I bought yesterday!

I look forward to bringing more folks on to the project, but since part of the point of the project is figuring out new ways to get stuff done, I'm certainly going to put that imaginary intern through its paces! Buckle up, newbie, spring is coming.