Sometimes downtime isn’t such a bad thing
We are just coming off of nearly a month of enforced downtime. Not something we ever would have done willingly, and not something we expected to bring about exciting new changes, but that seems to be the exact result. Rather then scrambling trying to make up for lost time, feeling behind, etc, we are actually slightly in awe of where we are after a month of almost no energy spent on RAGGEDedge. As it turns out, the downtime provided us an unforeseen opportunity to take a step back. Our time away from being engrossed in the daily day to day activities of running RAGGEDedge (tweaking the website, updating Etsy, making product…) enabled us to take the time to think about where we are, how we got here, and where want to go in the future.
Instead of just continuing to do what we what we were doing, we were able to see things with a fresh perspective. Conversations with potential distributors and wholesale accounts, combined with statistics we’ve known about our sales and our customers for a long time, suddenly became a reason to revamp the message and marketing of our website in its entirety. Getting feedback on that (so far entirely positive) has further pushed us to explore including new materials (such as machined titanium webbing hardware) into our designs that would not be on our horizon otherwise.
The fresh mindset has also got us in the midst of a backpack design. A long awaited project that we’ve been staunchly avoiding, even as a custom project (although many a person has tried to bribe us).
As entrepreneurs its easy to get caught up in working really hard in order to be successful, and not so easy to justify not working as a way to be even more successful, but I think its a worthy consideration.
