March is a crazy month for wholesale brands like mine. While retail has been nicely settled so far this year, the brands supplying practices are all looking at their sales curves, account openings and nervously betting on best sellers they have stocked up on.
It’s mad March and I usually love it. This is a month full of action and this year it is arguably the most action packed I’ve ever seen. It’s been a rollercoaster and frankly, I just don’t know where to start.
Optician’s editor Simon asked me if I did much business in Russia and if so, was I going to stop given the grave situation in Ukraine? “I gave up on Russia years ago,” I told him. “If you think Brexit was bad for business, try exporting bespoke frames into Russia.”
I tried to put the war to one side for a moment so I could concentrate on cashflow, but from mid-February to mid-March, I’d gone from top of a rollercoaster to stuck halfway up. I’d exposed the business with a massive expansion plan and whilst stressing about the potential fallout at the dinner table, my wife quickly highlighted the plight of families fleeing Ukraine to point out that things weren’t bad in the grand scheme of things.
Later this month, I’ll be going to New York to roll out my new Catch London brand, which has been in planning for six months. I’ve just hired 15 new sales reps and my marketing for the brand is the most money I’ve spent on anything since I opened my factory in London. At the planning stage, we took a bet on Covid easing and us riding the bounce in March and April.
As I type this, 12,000 American opticians are receiving Willy Wonka-style golden tickets to my ‘Acetate Kitchen’ in New York. I’ve essentially shipped a factory over to America in a container for the trade show stand. The trouble was, as war broke out, my container got stuck in the Netherlands. I downloaded a ship tracker and watched as it then spent another week in Hamburg. It needed to leave to get to New York and despite the chaps at the shipping company confidently saying it was OK, worsening news from Ukraine eroded my confidence. I had my carpenter make two more acetate kitchens quick smart and then paid an eye watering amount to fly them over. Opticians arriving with Golden Tickets to see an empty stand would not be a success. Although the ship left this morning it won’t make it to New York before the show. I’m pleased my disaster was averted but at this cost it's no cause for celebration.
The company also designed and printed 10,000 brochures for my new MD1888 brand, which has just launched in America (and the UK), but to make sure these arrived in time for Vision Expo at the end of the month, I had to call on everyone, and I mean everyone to muck in. Even the eyewear production team was enthusiastically stuffing envelopes and slapping on labels instead of polishing glasses. It brings a tear to my eye seeing everyone mucking in together when it matters.
The machine chugs on in other parts of the business. I’ve been making glasses for three new films and meeting some superstars remains a perk of my job. But the real fun is designing and making the eyewear for a film. I can’t mention the films here but give it two years and you can be sure I’ll be boasting like crazy.
I’ve also been struggling with online sales this month. I’ve talked about why I don’t sell Tom Davies online, but I do wonder why more opticians haven’t put their stock online. I had a chat with a UK based developer about making an online Tom Davies portal that I can give to optician customers free of charge. The idea would not be for me to cut out the optician, but to give my accounts a way to sell my frames to their customers online. Watch this space.
As I write this, it's almost the middle of March and I’m about to ride down the first big drop of the rollercoaster. Who’d have thought that just a few weeks ago the world was a different place. My mind is full of both excitement and dread from when I think about what might have happened in the world and to my business in the next few weeks. This is mad March and anything could happen.