To Have or Have Not

To Have or Have Not was Originally Posted on November 21, 2005 by lavarock

I have been spending quite a bit of time helping the Kona Coffee Council fix their membership list prior to the Annual General Meeting. Our membership ranks are increasing and we are changing over to a new website. We also are committing to a number of new opportunities to showcase Kona Coffee. It looks to be a very full year ahead.

As you may know, I’m trying to get about 3300 new coffee trees started and I’m not making the progress I had hoped. Since I have not been called for Jury Duty again this week, I’m hoping that I can get more done. I’m also removing things in the kitchen in preparation of a complete remodel.

On the coffee sales front, I sent out an email to existing website members and picked up some nice sales. Thanks to those who bought coffee and keep watching your email for more deals.

I used to write out nice newsletters but they didn’t generate enough sales to be worth the time to format them and come up with content. I had sales every month, I added photos and then also had links to sites, which were fun to access while enjoying a cup of coffee. Perhaps I just bit off too much work before I had enough customers and visitors to enjoy the newsletter. In any event, as time permits, I may be able to continue them, but certainly not in the next few moths.

Speaking of sales, I hope to offer a limited number of gift baskets again this holiday season. If you are thinking of sending a gift basket of coffee items, you might want to go to ItsKona.Com and create an account. I’ll be mailing info to registered members in the next week or so.

AS regular readers (and people who know me), I am cheap. I try to save money wherever I can. In fact, just today I was at COSTCO and passed the printer section. I saw a gentleman who looked to be ready to purchase a HP printer. I said to him “Do you know that printer will be on sale in the next couple of days?” He did not and thanked me. I may have saved him $35. We chatted for the next hour or so (actually, I seemed to do most of the talking), telling him all sorts of things to save money on telephone calls, travel, and so on.

That leads me to an idea that I just implemented. When I prepare a bag of coffee for shipment, I have been labeling it in what I call the “Retail” packaging. That includes full labels and award stickers and a clip to recluse the gusset bag after opening it. As you can imagine, these extra labels and the clip tend to increase the cost of the product. The Retail bag looks nice and is appropriate for a store shelf or to be given as a gift. Not everyone needs a nice presentation and might be willing to save a dollar if they order the lower packaging option. Since the labels I use are not necessarily cheap and I put them on by hand, I felt I would try this option and see how well it is received.

The back label explains how Pele helps us create our coffee, but if you have read it a couple of times, do you need it on every package? Knowing my coffee won the Cream of the Crop award might help a store customer choose my coffee over another brand, but if you are ordering online, you have already seen the award and made that buying decision.

So whether you think of it as a reduction in cost to not have the labels, or an increase in cost to make the bag more pleasing, it really comes down to a dollar difference in price and you have a choice as to who keeps the dollar J

I may extend this idea to other products on the site if this works well. Currently I have enabled the option on bags weighing from 8oz to 2 pounds. The 5 pound bags already have some reductions of cost based upon quantity. The 2 and 4 ounce bags are either used as stocking stuffers or gifts and normally use different labeling anyway.

It will be interesting to see how well this option catches on.