Greetings from the
trade show floor! We just completed the Promotional Products
Association trade show in Dallas and are headed to Orlando
on Wednesday for the PGA Merchandise Show. We should know
by the end of February how much of a success MouseDriver
will be! BTW, the new website is up and running: www.mousedriverchronicles.com.
Lessons Learned
Our search for a
company to fulfill MouseDriver retail orders is over!
We found a fulfillment house in Reno, Nevada (conveniently
located near our time share in Lake Tahoe) who will stock
all of our inventory, integrate secure on-line ordering
with our website, provide 24 hour customer service and
take orders/ship product to anyone who orders via our
800# or through our website. In addition, we have access
to over 450 inventory reports that will allow us to track
when, where, how fast, etc. MouseDriver's are moving.
We're paying a premium for this service, but it essentially
takes away the headache of us having to deal with orders
(i.e. all we see is a check in the bank account at the
end of the month) and allows us to focus on the marketing
and PR side of things.
We finally completed
our negotiations with suppliers in the promotional products
industry, and yes, those negotiation skills learned at
Wharton were put to work. (FYI: A supplier sells product
to a distributor company who has lots of sales reps that
sell the product to corporations as a promotional product.
We sell to the supplier, they mark it up and sell to the
distributor who then marks it up and sells to the corporation.)
We decided to do a co-exclusive with two suppliers; DataPad
is a very innovative company who focuses on manufacturing
unique mousepads and desktop accessories. Barlow is the
largest supplier in the promo product industry and has
established itself as a premier brand name. The co-exclusive
allows us to obtain larger coverage, benefit from the
product marketing of both companies, and introduce MouseDriver
into the market as quickly as possible. The largest promotional
products industry trade show was held last week in Dallas,
and both DataPad and Barlow were exhibiting the product.
We should see a very large increase in sales in this industry
within the next 3 months!
When you're not
a .com company with millions of dollars in venture capital
financing, you quickly learn to utilize your existing
resources very effectively. Although we weren't able to
move hundreds of thousands of MouseDriver's during the
Holiday Season, we were able to use MouseDriver to assist
us in purchasing other products and services. Hence the
beauty of a barter ecomony...something we all learned
at some point in time in high school economics. Over the
past four months, we've bartered MouseDriver's for: two
state-of-the-art golf putters, customized Mousepads, future
ad space in golf magazines and newspaper publications,
software and a slew of different promotional products.
Let us know if you're interested in making a deal.
What We've Done
- Ordered MouseDriver Mousepads, customized
media kit folders, button down Oxfords, and customized
point-of-purchase displays for the PGA Merchandise Show.
MouseDriver t-shirts are soon to follow.
- Sent product sales kits to major department
stores, mall retailers and specialty golf shops in hopes
of doing deals for the Father's Day retail season.
- Began negotiating (primarily wholesale
price and bundling options) with major brand name retailers.
- Released our 2nd press release over
the PRNewswire and Golf Services Newswire.
- Completed our new and improved website
and registered www.mousedriver.com
with Yahoo!
- Been featured on the front page of
the business section in The Orange County Register and
appeared (half page article) in the February 2000 issues
of Senior Golfer and Golf Retailer Magazines.
