I started Fold Journal after getting into Bullet Journaling as a way to help manage my thoughts and de-clutter my mind a bit. Bullet Journaling has been a very useful tool for me to help slow my mind down and think things out a bit more. I have a bad tendency of letting things fall out of my head almost as fast I put things in sometimes and just writing it down helps immensely with that.
I started out with a rather large journal I picked up off of Amazon and started following the “BuJo” format as closely as I found necessary and things went very well for awhile. However I never found it convenient to carry around and use when I really needed it, so I naturally came across Field Notes notebooks that fit very nicely into my pocket and allowed me to write things down wherever. I was a bit put off by the price point of these and other similar notebooks, at $12 for 3 little notebooks, it just seemed a bit crazy to me. I naturally thought “I could do this cheaper!” and unlike many of my other ideas that just sit there, I actually went about and did it!
Business Overview
I basically decided that it sounded much more reasonable to sell these little notebooks with dot-grid paper for ~$2 or $10 for a pack of 5. The notebooks would be very simple cardboard like cover with decent paper that work with almost any pen. I did some market research and even did a little blog post on the site about it to show everyone what was already available and why they should buy a Fold Journal instead. Some customers eventually actually found this information to be quite useful. With a general idea of what I wanted to do and where this would fit into the world of notebooks I focused on production…
Getting a supplier and the nitty gritty of a simple journal
I went out on a search to find someone to make these notebooks for me, I certainly would not be able to make something cheaper or in any reasonable quantity by hand. I really wanted to make this in the US, but quickly found that I would not be getting heard by anyone capable of hitting my price point without some serious sales to back it up!
I ended up searching sites like Alibaba and others and eventually found a supplier that made various journals and looked to be able to handle what I wanted to do. This ended up being a much more elaborate process than I had initially imagined, there must have been over 100 emails exchanged back and forth just to iron out what we were making. Between my lack of knowledge on paper products (paper weights?!) and design (cover art? oh yeah…) and a pretty high language barrier, it was a bit frustrating and nerve wracking getting to a point where I would be making that first purchase. There was also an issue of trust in this whole process, for this initial buy I was only spending a few hundred dollars but I was never able to get a sense of security about making that purchase. It eventually just came down to a leap faith. Hopefully these notebooks come in looking like I want, otherwise I just wasted all that money and time for nothing…
International shipping/payments
To make these initial purchases I could just use Paypal. Below a certain transaction cost, this is the best way to do things. Eventually I did move up in transaction sizes to justify the overhead of doing wire transfers and such but that stuff isn’t terribly exciting and there are plenty of sites to help navigate these things. However, shipping and transaction fees did end up taking a much larger bite out of the product cost than I had anticipated. Starting out, I paid just as much for shipping and money transactions as I did for the actual notebooks. This brought back my hopes of this model taking off quite as well as I had planned, but it still seemed quite doable after running the numbers.
Quality control
Another concern with doing this type of thing overseas is quality control and getting exactly what I was asking/looking for. Surprisingly my first shipment that came in was exactly what I was asking for aside from a few disfigured notebook packs. I had requested that the notebooks all be pre-wrapped in sets of 5 which made handling shipping and selling on Amazon much easier. Overall there was probably around 5% of what came in that I could not directly sell or that I would need to repackage myself. This was considerably higher than I had hoped, but again it was something I could deal with.
Many Amazon sellers don’t even really touch their own products, they just have everything drop-shipped to a handler that does all the quality control and Amazon processing for you. However, this was way too expensive for what I was selling so I never got to go down this road.
Selling on your own website and hosting
Now that I have a product to sell I need a way to get it to all these customers that have been dying to get their hands on my new-fangled ‘economical’ Fold Journal. Of course, I bought a domain name which happened to go along with naming the Fold Journal. I had attempted to run the Fold Journal website like I have many of my other sites with a static or ‘serverless’ setup, but that hit a bit of a wall when I tried finding a way to handle the marketplace aspect of actually selling the product and managing the transaction. It looked like Snipcart might be one of the few at the time that could do that, but even that got overly technical to upkeep for what I thought was such a simple thing to do. Eventually I ended up hosting the site with Shopify, which was extremely easy to setup. Of coursing going this route isn’t free and costs about $30/month to run.
I took some pictures on my own to get the site up and running, but quickly found out that I am not a photographer! Eventually I ended up getting some much better content from my customers which was very awesome. I also ended getting a few photo sets done on Fiveer.com to help with some of the product listing pictures. This is certainly something that is worth doing right and early on as it the main thing that is going to sell your product.
Amazon, Ebay and more fees
Sadly just throwing up a nice website with a product listing did not set off a rocket on the sales of these Fold Journals. Even with some marketing that we will get into, my own site was just never able to sell much. I went to Amazon and Ebay and setup an account and listed my Fold Journals there to see what would happen. These of course have their own fees of $40/month for Amazon plus other fees on each sale and Ebay just takes a cut off the top of each sale.
Ebay was pretty straight forward to setup and list, however the nature of how Ebay works can make it quite slow to list and sell a notebook. Most people are looking to find something secondhand there and are expecting deals, so it can be difficult to stand out as the primary seller and use Ebay as a storefront.
Amazon worked out quite well and got things going much quicker than I had anticipated. I started out with a seller fullfilled account that was rather cheap to get up and going but that doesn’t give you a buy button on your listing like you would see on most products on the site requiring a couple extra click to purchase. We will get into the Fullfilled By Amazon (FBA) stuff in a bit…
Shipping setup at home
While doing all of the web and store preparations I had to get the materials together to properly ship these things out. For the most part you can get going with some boxes or envelopes and a thermal printer. The thermal printer I found was an old Zebra that was quite a pain to get up and going and printing properly. Many of the sites oddly didn’t support proper output formats for labelling. I had to resort to hacks and even a few scripts to crop and generate a proper output for the labels. This has gotten better as time has gone on and may have been easier with a brand-new top of line printer, but was surprisingly difficult to handle at the time.
Amazon FBA
Fullfilled By Amazon or FBA, the amazing service that allows us to get all that stuff with a Prime account shipped to our houses silly fast. I eased my way into this and tested the waters with my now upgraded $40/month account. To get started you just ship however many items you want in a box over to Amazon with thier proper labeling and such and they stock them in thier warehouses across the country (or world) ready to ship at a moments notice. It was quite impressive to see how easy it was to setup, I started just sending 10 packs to see what would happen and make sure I didn’t screw it up. Then those 10 magically got bought up in a few weeks so I shipped 20, then 30, up to the point that I was shipping around 100 packs every month or two and having to up my orders from over-seas for more notebooks to be made to keep up. Never expected to start having real inventory and logistic issues, this is great! While it was nice to see these sales start to take off, there was a decent amount of work I had to do in the basement checking all the incoming packs for defects, applying labels to each pack, counting incoming and outgoing stuff, and labelling boxes and dropping packages off at UPS. It is obvious to see why people will often hire this work out, but I was curious what all would go into doing it myself and it was tolerable for now.
Of course, there is a catch to the FBA thing, it not all just magical sales. In order to use this service Amazon gets a cut and for my $10, 5 pack of notebooks it cost almost $5 to have Amazon sell and fullfill the orders from their shelves. This doesn’t count for any separate marketing, product cost or anything else, 50% off the top went to Amazon for every notebook, even if the customer ordered a ton of them. This fee doesn’t quite hurt as much as the value of the product increases, but for something on the low end it ended up eating up almost all of the money to be made getting started. But I was curious if just getting enough of them out into the world would turn into something else or maybe I could cut production cost or leverage these quantities into some other sales channel or opportunities.
..work in progress, outline continued below…