Amy Sheng can sum up in one sentence why it’s important to have more female scientists and engineers designing products — especially if those products involve childbirth or breast-feeding. “A guy cannot fundamentally understand,” she said.
A Stanford-educated mechanical engineer, Ms. Sheng was reacting to recent efforts, including a hackathon that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology held in September to come up with a better breast pump. But the sentiment also applies to her own company’s invention, which is aimed chiefly at mothers. Read more…
We just published a case study about an advertising copywriter, Chris Pouy, who was tired of buffing the brands of others and started his own company, Cow Wow, to sell fun, cereal-flavored milks to children ages 5 to 12. In late 2012, Mr. Pouy introduced Fruity Trudy and Chocolate Chip Cathy near the company’s Los Angeles offices.
A distributor got Cow Wow into convenience stores and gas stations. Mr. Pouy landed Legoland and the Los Angeles Zoo. And then, months before he would sign a deal to place his product in 900 Kroger supermarkets, a funny thing happened. The late-night host Jimmy Kimmel riffed on Cow Wow in his monologue. The free nationwide publicity continued with glowing mentions in Cosmopolitan magazine and on BuzzFeed.
But the unexpected product endorsements and praise were directed at millennials, whereas Mr. Pouy had branded and packaged his organic, 1-percent, naturally flavored milks for elementary and middle school children. He couldn’t help but wonder: Had he picked the wrong audience? Later, when sales in Kroger fell short of expectations while 15 cases of Cow Wow sold out quickly at a college food court, Mr. Pouy felt compelled to rethink his business plan. He came up with three possible courses of action: Read more…
An old-line business tries to compete in a high-tech economy.
I am not going to do it. Why not? Five reasons.
First, my financial person, plant manager and I created a T-chart of “reasons for a layoff” and “reasons for delaying a layoff.” Here are a few highlights.
Reasons for a layoff:
Stop the financial bleeding.
Keep the company financially solid.
Don’t ask everyone in the company to take a pay cut – doing so could cause other kinds of problems, including losing people to higher-paying jobs.
Reasons for delaying a layoff:
Use the slower period to build capability in skills and to improve things in the plant. The company can afford to invest, and so it should invest.
Don’t risk losing people whose skills and knowledge we’ve invested in developing.
Don’t lose people who work well together as a team only to have to replace them later with people who might not be as good a fit.
Part of my goal as a business owner has been to create and maintain jobs. I want to employ these people.
And then we ran the numbers. Here’s what we found: Read more…
You’ve now been through the long saga of how my website came into being — and why it took so long (the series started here). Please take a look at the finished site, and then, if you would be so kind, I’d appreciate some input on the following questions:
Should I direct people coming from our Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign to the home page or to the gallery page? My theory of Internet shopping is that people come to us to see our conference tables, and that’s what we should show them. Immediately.
In our previous site, all of the links in my AdWords campaigns bypassed the home page and put shoppers directly into the product sections of the site. My inclination is to continue this practice, but in the new site we’ve changed the homepage to tell a more compelling story about the company, including how we make our product and who our clients are. Do you think that shoppers, clicking on a link without knowing anything about us, would rather get reassuring news about the company first and navigate their own way to the products? Or vice versa? Read more…
In 2001, my husband and I ditched the dot-com rat race of Silicon Valley for a more peaceful life in the mountains of Lake Tahoe. As burned-out software engineers, we had grand visions of trading our keyboards for snowboards, our motorcycles for bicycles, and taking the trail instead of taking BART. To help support our new lifestyle, we invested our savings ($30,000) and opened Jimmy Beans Wool, a 500 square-foot yarn shop in Reno, Nev.
Yes, a yarn shop. Before leaving San Francisco I had learned how to knit and quickly became obsessed. My husband, Doug, built our website from scratch, initially just to supplement in-store sales, and before we knew it we had our first online order.
We were thrifty, we were self-taught, and we had strong views about the online customer experience. Our goals were no more complicated than to be around something we loved, in a place we loved, and to do it our way, on our own terms.
And that is exactly how it went for 10 years. We did more with less, and we taught ourselves — and our employees — new skills to keep up. We lived and operated in a bubble. It was a frantic and fast-moving bubble, but it was a fun bubble. And it paid off through a combination of timing (you heard about the knitting boom of 2004, right?), luck (we started filming YouTube product-review videos back in 2007), and grit (for the first few years, Doug built all of our systems at night, after getting home from his day job). Our online sales grew to almost $7 million by 2012. Did I mention we were selling yarn? Read more…
