August - October 2005
August, 2005
Major Accomplishments The month of August has been a pretty exciting month for us. It kicked off with the great news that we won the Make Mine a $Million Award. This new capital enabled us to bring on a part-time sales manager to help drive new sales. August is also Gift Show month in our industry and we were able to announce this award to all our sales reps, partners, and customers. We exhibited our products at gift shows in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle and were pleased with the positive response from buyers to all of our new products. Currently we're in the midst of planning our new products for 2006 and are weighing all the new financing options available to us through the CMI loan and American Express financial services. These new options will play a critical role in boosting our growth.
Coaching We have completed the DiSC profile and are looking forward to going through the alignment process. We also look forward to having our first call with our coach Nely and getting her advise on other ways we can grow the business.
PR and Personal Commitment Winning the 3M award has gotten us even more excited about the future of SmartsCo. We raved about the award at recent tradeshows, on our blog and in our newsletter which goes to over 2000 members of the SmartsCo community. We were delighted to have calls with folks on the PR team at American Express and look forward to working with them on future PR efforts, events, and the like. We have already been invited to serve on a panel at an upcoming NY Times Business Summit moderated by OPEN's president in September and also understand one of our products with a profile of SmartsCo will be in a gift bag at second conference in October. In addition this month we have been reaching out to media to get them excited about featuring our products during the upcoming gift season.
September, 2005
SmartsCo's September has been filled with marketing and product plans, as well as a new infusion of financing thanks to American Express OPEN, through the 3M award. We finalized our product plan for 2006, planning to create seven new products, expanding our wine line as well as creating new products that will have appeal to different kinds of retailers and could have stronger sales in Q2 and Q3 traditionally our slower quarters. We also finalized plans and management for an October 5 marketing event for one of our new products, WineParty. This event is in partnership with a new wine web site called lolawines.com, and will raise funds for San Francisco Women's Community Clinic, providing free, quality healthcare for women, by women. Additionally, near the end of September we received a $10,000 line of credit from American Express, thanks to the contacts developed through CMI and Make Mine a $Million. We have large printing bills to pay for our new products and this line of credit is extremely helpful.
October, 2005
October has been a big month for us as we get ready for the busy holiday season. We got in our much anticipated shipment of new products and were able to ship out lots of orders to customers eagerly waiting for them. This represents substantial growth for us, doubling the number of products we have on the market from 5 to 10 different SKUs. We celebrated this accomplishment with two release parties for our new WineParty gift: the first at one of our top winery accounts, J Winery, and the second as a co-launch party with a new web site, lolawines.com. This event was also a fundraiser for SF's Women's Community Clinic.
We're also planning fun launch parties for WineParty, BeerSmarts, and our WinePassports in DC, NY and SF in November. And we got our first media coverage for WineParty, in the Sunday, October 16 Washington Post. We've spent a lot of this past month working on developing new products for the February and Summer shows of 2006, doing some writing ourselves for new WinePassports, interviewing designers, and working with writers for other new products. We had our first call with our coach Nely Galen which was highly valuable. During this call we discussed the "growing pains" we are having evaluating all the opportunities on our plates and how to prioritize those opportunities that will give us the most visibility. Nely has put us in touch with a top publicist who we plan to meet with soon to discuss our PR and promotion strategy. We also had our second call with Dresdene and look forward to putting together our 90-day plan. We're also meeting with a financial advisor from American Express to look at our financials and provide advice.
Our most exciting news is we've been selected by OPEN to participate in a national print ad campaign. After some scouting agents came over to the office to interview and photograph us, we were selected based in-part on the positive experience we had with American Express providing us with a line of credit and extending that line in just 24 hours to help us pay for our print run as we wait for payment from our customers. We had a great time during the photo shoot with the film crew and folks from Ogilvy & Mather and look forward to seeing the ad in print next month. Quite an exciting opportunity
Major Accomplishments The month of August has been a pretty exciting month for us. It kicked off with the great news that we won the Make Mine a $Million Award. This new capital enabled us to bring on a part-time sales manager to help drive new sales. August is also Gift Show month in our industry and we were able to announce this award to all our sales reps, partners, and customers. We exhibited our products at gift shows in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle and were pleased with the positive response from buyers to all of our new products. Currently we're in the midst of planning our new products for 2006 and are weighing all the new financing options available to us through the CMI loan and American Express financial services. These new options will play a critical role in boosting our growth.
Coaching We have completed the DiSC profile and are looking forward to going through the alignment process. We also look forward to having our first call with our coach Nely and getting her advise on other ways we can grow the business.
PR and Personal Commitment Winning the 3M award has gotten us even more excited about the future of SmartsCo. We raved about the award at recent tradeshows, on our blog and in our newsletter which goes to over 2000 members of the SmartsCo community. We were delighted to have calls with folks on the PR team at American Express and look forward to working with them on future PR efforts, events, and the like. We have already been invited to serve on a panel at an upcoming NY Times Business Summit moderated by OPEN's president in September and also understand one of our products with a profile of SmartsCo will be in a gift bag at second conference in October. In addition this month we have been reaching out to media to get them excited about featuring our products during the upcoming gift season.
September, 2005
SmartsCo's September has been filled with marketing and product plans, as well as a new infusion of financing thanks to American Express OPEN, through the 3M award. We finalized our product plan for 2006, planning to create seven new products, expanding our wine line as well as creating new products that will have appeal to different kinds of retailers and could have stronger sales in Q2 and Q3 traditionally our slower quarters. We also finalized plans and management for an October 5 marketing event for one of our new products, WineParty. This event is in partnership with a new wine web site called lolawines.com, and will raise funds for San Francisco Women's Community Clinic, providing free, quality healthcare for women, by women. Additionally, near the end of September we received a $10,000 line of credit from American Express, thanks to the contacts developed through CMI and Make Mine a $Million. We have large printing bills to pay for our new products and this line of credit is extremely helpful.
October, 2005
October has been a big month for us as we get ready for the busy holiday season. We got in our much anticipated shipment of new products and were able to ship out lots of orders to customers eagerly waiting for them. This represents substantial growth for us, doubling the number of products we have on the market from 5 to 10 different SKUs. We celebrated this accomplishment with two release parties for our new WineParty gift: the first at one of our top winery accounts, J Winery, and the second as a co-launch party with a new web site, lolawines.com. This event was also a fundraiser for SF's Women's Community Clinic.
We're also planning fun launch parties for WineParty, BeerSmarts, and our WinePassports in DC, NY and SF in November. And we got our first media coverage for WineParty, in the Sunday, October 16 Washington Post. We've spent a lot of this past month working on developing new products for the February and Summer shows of 2006, doing some writing ourselves for new WinePassports, interviewing designers, and working with writers for other new products. We had our first call with our coach Nely Galen which was highly valuable. During this call we discussed the "growing pains" we are having evaluating all the opportunities on our plates and how to prioritize those opportunities that will give us the most visibility. Nely has put us in touch with a top publicist who we plan to meet with soon to discuss our PR and promotion strategy. We also had our second call with Dresdene and look forward to putting together our 90-day plan. We're also meeting with a financial advisor from American Express to look at our financials and provide advice.
Our most exciting news is we've been selected by OPEN to participate in a national print ad campaign. After some scouting agents came over to the office to interview and photograph us, we were selected based in-part on the positive experience we had with American Express providing us with a line of credit and extending that line in just 24 hours to help us pay for our print run as we wait for payment from our customers. We had a great time during the photo shoot with the film crew and folks from Ogilvy & Mather and look forward to seeing the ad in print next month. Quite an exciting opportunity
posted by Julie Tucker and Jennifer Elias at Wednesday, December 14, 2005
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