Want to see real time stats for your product sales? Pop over to your account, view a product, and click through to the new “Sales Stats” page. Sales can be viewed by month, day, and most recent. Aggregated sales are also filterable by product attributes like color and size. Take a look, let us know what you think! We have several additional features we intend to add this year to better communicate product sales history. Stay tuned.
As the Twitter implosion continues unabated, we took a moment to revisit Cotton Bureau profiles and the support we offer for outbound links. Until today, your only options were Twitter, Instagram, and a generic link field to be used at your discretion. We’ve significantly extended that now to include some other networks you might have heard of including Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Dribbble, Behance, Github, Patreon, and, yes, Mastodon. If we missed your favorite, let us know. We can always add more if enough people are interested.
Speaking of Mastodon, we went ahead and created an official @cottonbureau account. If you’re looking for The Back Room Lite (or The Back Room, Slightly More Frequently Than Once a Month), look no further.
While we were sweeping, dusting, and moving the profile link furniture around, we also implemented support for URL-based verification. Cotton Bureau Elsewhere links now support rel="me" which means if you point them at one of your off-site accounts (like Mastodon), others might just see a fancy checkmark indicating your account is authentic.
Lastly, if all this talk of Mastodon has made you curious, please feel free to sign up using our @mastodon.social invite link. The front door has been closed for a while, but we found this secret loophole that allows all our friends to get in. Shhh, don’t tell anyone.
Unless you spent 2022 hiding under a rock (we wouldn’t blame you), you might have heard we started offering premium phone cases. The cases are tough (confirmed through more than a few drops in our personal testing), the printing is sharp, and the price is right. It’s our first new on demand product after apparel, but it won’t be our last. 😉
In user account land, we also consolidated payments, added a balance view, plus whole new sections dedicated to managing discounts and notifications. Speaking of discounts, we restored the friends and family discount and started handing out free shirt and phone case codes like candy (candy that you earn by selling, uh, lots of other candy). We revamped our discount engine as well to share the load and offer more of everyone’s favorite promotion, free shipping.
The public site received some love as well with searching, filtering, and sorting for stores and featured products for premium stores. The home page got a slight tweak to increase emphasis on our favorite products. (New stuff is great! But we have 10 years of amazing designs that deserve to be seen.)
In one of our favorite developments, we kicked off this very email which enjoyed a strong six month run last year and is now entering a second healthy season of sharing updates with all of you lovely people.
When we rolled out phone cases last year, we issued a call for some courageous early adopters to help us test things before they were ready for prime time. That worked so well, we want to expand and improve that program. If you are interested in being the first to know about (and trial) new products, reply to this email. Before we make something available to everyone, we want your feedback on the product quality, the website interface, etc. As a bit of a preview, we are planning one major new product category this year plus 2–3 smaller product introductions from our existing partners. Space is limited, we are not going to be able to accommodate everyone.
If you’ve ever seen a sticker on Cotton Bureau, or an enamel pin, or a poster, a mug, or fancy socks, you might have wondered how you could get in on that. Until now, we haven’t been ready to open up stock products to everyone. That changes this year. If you are interested in selling something that isn’t available through our on demand program, email us. We’ll walk you through everything, it’s super simple.
There are some costs with stock products, so let’s get that out of the way.
Effective immediately, on demand apparel prices have been bumped up a few bucks. You don’t need to do anything. Retail prices on the site have been updated by the same amount, so your margin hasn’t changed. If for some reason you prefer to reduce your cut, feel free to reach out to us. You can do that directly in your account, or we can handle it for you. At this point it is our hope (and expectation) that inflation has eased enough that when we sit own to review the global economy in January 2024 no further changes will be necessary.
No increase has been made to phone case prices as that product was introduced late enough in the world-wide inflation cycle that our costs were fully known.
For those of you with stock products, a slight adjustment to our fulfillment fees is coming there as well (effective February 1). We’ll be emailing you all separately about those changes.
Finally, after 6+ years of free storage for stock products, our warehouse costs have increased to the point that we are no longer able to avoid charging for inventory management. Again, for anyone with stock products, those prices and more information will be communicated directly. Our intention is only to cover our costs on those items, so prices should be minimal.
It’s not our habit to pre-announce features as the exact timing can be difficult to nail down and the scope can shift significantly during development. However, there’s something to be said for a little look ahead every so often.
Philosophically, we divide our time roughly equally between maintenance, quality of life / site features, and new product development (e.g. phone cases). We’ve already mentioned the plan to onboard one major new partner this year with an entirely new product category. While we don’t want to get into too much detail, it’s going to be a pave-the-cowpath sort of product. We’ve offered items like this as stock products before. Now we’re taking the next step to make it available on demand.
On the maintenance side, there are a number of behind-the-scenes tasks that aren’t of interest to anyone except perhaps other developers. We’ve got servers and libraries to upgrade plus a few crusty bits of code to whip into shape. Boring stuff like how product images are generated and stored over time becomes a drag on more exciting things we would like to do.
Other than that, some much requested smaller features are on the docket (ahem, multiple print locations) along with a few fun customer-focused ideas, and, if the stars align, maybe one idea that has been on the to do list for 10 years will finally happen.
Not long ago (okay, it was 2018), we had the brilliant idea to randomly give away matching prizes to customers and creators. Well, we’re doing it again. We’re hereby announcing the First Annual Holiday High Five, 2022 Edition.
Starting now, ending Friday, Dec. 16 at 8 PM ET every on demand shirt or phone case purchased using the code HOLIDAYHIGHFIVE is worth one entry into our iPhone 14 giveaway. One customer order will be drawn at random, both the customer and the product designer will win a brand new iPhone 14. All you need to do is tell people. We’ll provide the prize(s), you send the people.
Oh, and by the way, if we get 500 retweets on the announcement, we’re going to upgrade the iPhones 14 to iPhones 14 Pro. If we leave 500 retweets in the dust, we’re willing to throw more prizes on the fire, if you know what we mean. Teamwork makes the dream work. Let’s go, let’s go.
All accounts on Cotton Bureau now having a running balance (“to be paid”) which is settled monthly (typically the 15th). You can see yours right now in your payment history tab. (Not the most obvious place, we know. Maybe it will get rearranged in the future.)
In the olden days (October), pre-order campaigns would be paid out 15 days after campaigns ended while stock and on demand products would be paid the 15th. We’ve consolidated all those into a single balance and payout that you can view any time in your account. That should make it a good deal easier to see what is coming and to know when it is arriving.
Depending on your account type, you might also notice a “site credit” box, or it’s possible your “to be paid” number is negative. If you happen to have one of those special accounts that we work with to coordinate merch giveaways, you can now see a live accounting of how much of your deposit has been used.
More certainly to come in this area, all in good time.
Speaking of new stuff, we’ve got a whole new area in your account dedicated to managing notifications, a sure crowd pleaser. Step one for us was integrating Mailchimp’s API, so you are now able to directly control which emails (including this one) you get from us via your account. We’ll be adding additional notification management options as we are able to incorporate each service type into that area. Purely hypothetically though, if you wanted more (or less) frequent sales notifications, that might be something we are working on, hypothetically.