Thursday, May 31, 2012

First Order!

jmminiatureslogo3I've been spending my free hours pouring over an extremely long Excel spreadsheet from a supplier full of all kinds of shiney toys. My first pass through of filling holes in ranges we stock, adding new stuff I think could sell and might be interesting came to a staggering GBPounds4000!!!
Yikes. Add in the conversion and that's way more than we have in the bank.
So I kept trimming away. Out go the Wargames Factory Samurai. Cut the rule books. Trim quantities by half.
Got it down to around GBP1400. Still too much especially when remembering we have to still pay for duties and shipping.
But my partner came up with a spiffy idea to get the order down to GBP750 and I've now sent off an order to stock up on some Perry plastics, PSC 15mm kits, a few Victrix Austrians and a few other bits that intrigue me (I'll blog about those later).

Retailing without a big corporate entity behind you to cover the bills and having to pay up front for stock is rather different from ordering for the grocery store. I have to be more careful with That looks fun and it might sell. I've got to be a lot more sure that I have a potential customer for things.

But the other danger is that if you don't have it then you lose the sale and the customer will go get it elsewhere before you can restock.

And we don't even have a webstore yet. Those are apparently harder to set up than I imagined, but a tech savvy friend is working on it. We do have a Facebook page though. Feel free to 'Like' it and see the announcement on our first sale!

2 comments:

  1. James

    You might want to check your Facebook link it seems to be dead. I am jealous that you've managed to combine jobs, life and gaming into one post!

    Cheers

    PD

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  2. It took me to the JM Minis FB page. One still has to sign into FB though once one gets there.

    ReplyDelete