Weeknotes #2

As I type, Tash is squashing bugs and working through legal paperwork. It’s not the most glamorous job, but good to get out of the way early in the day. This week we’re sharing our space with a course in Data Narratives, so things will be slightly busier around here, but I’m sure the smart minds in attendance will be inspiring.

Here’s a quick run down of our progress over the past week:

• Molly, the cat, took care of a random selection for the Friday giveaway. This was a lot less exciting than I was anticipating. The softness of her feet combined with reluctance and confusion toward walking over a graphics tablet were stumbling blocks we didn’t anticipate losing so much time to. Still, it was a fun experiment.
• Tash spoke with a PR friend about alternative marketing approaches. Our problem to date has been explaining the weight and materiality of our coasters. We’ve been considering offline approaches as these seem ideal for the medium, but we keep running into scale issues. Tash’s pal opened our eyes to the possibilities of targeted online advertising and timely mailouts.
• Our product packaging has evolved. We’ve moved from precisely (and awkwardly) cut tissue paper to shredded paper. This increases our packing speed and reduces the cost of packaging supplies. Double-win.
• Tash is continuing with the server migration process. It’s a hulking beast that continues to eat up time, but we’re learning lots of valuable lessons.
• We had our first order from a private Instagram account. It turns out this doesn’t play nicely with the system we’ve created so we’re figuring out a more sustainable workaround.
• We had some kind press this week, including an article dissecting our tabletop video, from Brazilian publication, Hypeness. This lead to an influx in orders from Brazil. We’re pleased our high shipping cost haven’t been too offputting, because we can’t do much to reduce them, given the weight of 4 pieces of stone.

This week we’re somewhat splitting our time between Coastermatic and other commitments, before Tash heads away on a well-deserved week long break. We’re looking forward to getting the server migration complete and launching customer-facing gift code purchasing, meaning you’ll be able to give the gift of coasters to give your friends for all those summer bbqs you’ll be heading to. We have another feature we’re really excited about launching, more details on that coming soon.