Need Summary of Speaker 2 as a speech and not a conversation



Speaker 1
So. So what is the what are the top three business goals for the this year.
Speaker 2
Starting from sales or, or targeting a 12% increase in sales from over last year?



Speaker 2
Some of that comes from a price increase. So it's not all in traffic. Okay. So traffic in terms of SEO is I'm looking for you guys to tell me what you know. We know what the traffic was in 23. What traffic increase can we get? So I need some help on that one. But basically the next goal, specific business goal is to increase our customer acquisition rate from the Web significantly.


Speaker 2
And that means 15% plus. We're doing different things to do that. Like this relationship that we're getting for with smart recognition, which we're getting a lot of email addresses from people who have come to the site. But from an SEO perspective and I really look at the goals by looking at what I have in SEM rush that were identified, the keywords related to ribbons in our positioning, they increase our positioning specifically in that segment to be about it should be above crowd.


Speaker 2
We have a better product offering a focus. So I know it's not going to be at the level of Amazon because there's a lot of other variables at play there. But to me, the next most important thing is to increase our visibility and customers it, because that is our key or key product category. Right? And secondary to that is to start building our presence in that in the metals category.

Speaker 2
Yeah. So yes. Yeah. The metals category, we secondary. So it's really on the ribbons in rosettes and to maintain and grow that significant growth in the metals category because we have such a little presence, because we have a I feel we have a competitive product line there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.


Speaker 2
So from a business point of view, the sales growth, customer acquisition, significant increase there. And then focus on from an ACL perspective, you know, just buy building out the keywords in the metals in increasing. And I look at that as the measurement of that, right, that how we rank and summarize compared to our competitors for each one of those categories, that the target audience is.


Speaker 2
First, major target is equestrian. And again, these are a variety of different people that are buying awards for equestrian events. Well, these could be people who own a barn and or holding a local event up to, you know, major players in the market. We're getting larger and larger orders on the website, and a lot of them are from equestrian accounts.


Speaker 2
Those people are most of our top level accounts are still going to prefer to buy through the phone because they want to just because they're spending, you know, $10,000 plus. So.


Speaker 2
Okay. But basically, our primary target on the Web and our most productive segment is equestrian. Okay. The secondarily you know, so that's above, you know, roughly 55% or 60% of our business. Okay. So that's that's how important that is. The second is the dog show market. Now, in here, we specialize in small and medium size events. We don't like, you know, the events that are on TV, the Westminster Dog Show, that's not in our you know, that's those are served by other people in the market that provide full service there, including, you know, setting up for the shows and things.


Speaker 2
Our our key target is and this has been a growing segment for us, one of this has been our over the last three years or four years, our fastest growing market segment. Okay. A lot of is because we're mailing catalogs to them as well. So but basically, they're very important to us and they're they're our fastest growing segment overall for the business.

Speaker 2
The third target audience is fairs and livestock related events. Okay. This could be like county fairs, state fairs, but there's a lot of other events that people have. Small groups, you know, could be students as well that are holding shows for their livestock. Like any and you can pick almost any any animal and there's an event for it.


Speaker 2
You can you can look at our fair catalog, their digital appeal, just to get an idea. But those have been our specialties. And I think the reason why those drive our business is because online no one else is focusing on like those markets online that I can tell us. We complement the online focus with the strong catalog focus, and that's been our history.


Speaker 2
So those are the markets we we mail to leads and customers consistently and they produce results for us. So those are the top now, the ones that we have focused focus on and do and we really haven't spent much effort on have been in the sports related. We haven't spend much related to schools online or general business recognition.


Speaker 2
There's a lot more competition in those segments. And that's not our forte. And it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to expand into those segments because I think, you know, it's always good to have a good portfolio of of customers. You know, as one market goes down, one can yeah, maybe going up. So I'd like to expand from our narrow focus, but I'll I'll give you more specific products that are purchased for each one of those markets so you get an idea.


Speaker 2
But basically, you can look at our paid advertising, too. We've focused mostly on ribbon related keywords and equestrian related keywords in our return. Investment is fantastic because of that. It's a very niche focus. So we can we do have some room to expand beyond that to test these other segments, although when we've tested them through paid search in the past, you know, it really drags down the dry considerably.


Speaker 2
So I just questioned the total value of that because but we do have product lines that if we have a specific strategy for it, we'll spend some money on to try to get some foothold out there. Yeah, we have a very big win of silver awards or silver plated products that's better than any of the competitors that you looked at.


Speaker 2
it's, it's not, you know, it's not like, yeah, we sell 100 ribbons that we may sell two or three silver products to the same event. Right. But we have a, I think a selection advantage there, although it's a smaller part. So, so because it's a smaller part, you know, we have a limited resource and so we haven't really spent much time on.


Speaker 2
So I think in our strategy moving forward is time to see how we can expand its keywords in those categories and see what we can get out of it, because we do have something to sell there. Yeah. So speaking of promos, total, you know, just a search perspective again. Yeah. expectations. I'm kind of wanting to look at your, your report and seeing what you can do.


Speaker 2
But my, my priority should be prioritization just from listening to, you know, going through all these reports and coming into this, I'll just kind of give you that, you know, the overall, you know, the first priority, you know, let's fix all the technical issues and errors and or, you know, the H1 tags and things like that that are typically the things that we can do relatively quickly and get a good result on.


Speaker 2
So that would be the first priority. Okay. The second priority to me is and there's some of these can be done in parallel, but to improve the the mobile experience in related SEO. I still have a question as to the, you know, what you can do from an SEO perspective for mobile that has a significant payback, but mainly because what you see today is Google's prioritizing all the paid ads, you know, So but if there's a way for us to get up in the rankings and also you point out some performance limitations, those would be things I'd like to nail down first.


Speaker 2
Okay. Okay. That'd be the second priority. Okay. The third one to me is improving the content overall site. And you've pointed out several areas where we can do that.


Speaker 2
To me, I think, again, we have a limited resource. You can see where we focus our attention on content. It's mainly been on the collection pages. Yeah, and I think that's given us some results. So by doing that, yeah. So we need to go through the rest of the collection pages to have some kind of content on the collection pages.


Speaker 2
And then once we have that done, look at the product pages to see we can what we can do. Okay. In there we may need to rearrange some things and we may need to do some AB testing to see how that works. Okay. Well, I would be interested to know also from a tactical point of view is if we can have in their product description section tabs where yeah, we display what we have there today and one tab is the second tab that can open that has more, I call it embellished content that would be picked up by the search engines.


Speaker 2
Yeah, yes. But the user could still read it and use it as usable. Right. But still, you know, I agree with what you said as far as the level of content and that would allow us to probably make the pages more unique in Google's eyes because we have so many pages, as you've pointed out, with duplicate content, that maybe by doing that we could start differentiating that content more.


Speaker 2
It was really we have a lot of ribbons. We have a large selection of ribbons that anyone has, but that results in a lot of duplicate content. Yeah. So, so maybe that's a way that we could, you know, really differentiate some of those products so that Google will see those as not as duplicate as duplicate content.


Speaker 2
In need your feedback in that regard. But yeah. And then the last priority just given, just because of the limited resource that we have, would be looking at the links upfront in the first priority, the technical. we like to get rid of all of the links that are broken, but then really spend time on that. Yeah, but here the this priority, the fourth area would be link building.


Speaker 2
Okay. You know, getting, putting together a strategy that's relevant to our markets to get good links, you know, into our site and the social media part. To me, I've deprioritized myself. I don't think it's as important, you know, I mean, I think the other things that we I just went through to me in my mind are more important than that.


Speaker 2
That's all. Okay. Number four here in the seasonal trends, we have an artificial trend that we create every year. As you probably see, if you look at the Shopify numbers, basically there's a a significant increase in sales in February. Yeah, and that's because our winter sale ends in February. So people, you know, buy early. And so we have said builds our manufacturing backlog.


Speaker 2
So it's really good for us. Yeah. Plus they pay for the product, which is good financially. So that time of year, it's not because of us. People have a lot of events, it's because they're taking advantage of the sale. And so then from here on, March is less is lower than February because of that. But then it comes back in April, May and June and July builds significantly so.

Speaker 2
So the benefits, anything that we do, we're going to see the biggest benefit in the summer months, spring and summer, which starts it starts it'll start ramping up in April, but May, June, July and August, that timeframe are key months for us. And then after that, after September, I think it's kind of lower that it comes back a little bit in October, but then November and December are lower months as well.


Speaker 2
So what we do there too is we cut back on our paid advertising in those months because of the seasonal, because not as many people are really they have less events because most of the events that we service are outdoor events and there's just less of those in the fall. And then in the winter, you know, December again is when our winter sales starts.


Speaker 2
It starts on December 1st, it ends on February 15th. And so some people will order early in December for the new year. Now, again, I'd say a lot of our events are outdoor events, but like in the in Arizona, for instance, or California, they could be having early year events. And we have some associations that, you know, by end it's in December for, you know, January events.


Speaker 2
So but the heart of the seasonality is really, you know, May, June, July and August are peak months. And I can send you a chart to show that.

Speaker 2
I'll give you some information related to the markets this and then also on the two key product categories for each market, give a little bit of a matrix. There. Yep. Okay.


Speaker 2
Yeah. Right now there's, it's low priority but we post pretty frequently to Facebook and Instagram. I want to increase that. We're looking at using Hootsuite so that we can lock down some of those same posts to LinkedIn and Pinterest as well. So we will be doing that shortly to start that process that the problem is that we have limited content opportunities that we've developed internally and we'd like to be doing more stories with people in our products, but we really haven't generated the excitement internally to do that in our manufacturing in Missouri and we're in Rhode Island.


Speaker 2
So it's like I haven't been able to get people to do that and I think that will increase. So I think even if we spent more time on social media, the the social media posts that get the most following are about our people or are about our, you know, some product features that are real things. They're being manufactured, you know, in our shop as they go through.


Speaker 2
So those get the highest following. A lot of people. Yeah, we make several posts related to our contests as well. What we're working, what we're working on is leveraging that we have roughly, you know, ten one or ten winners a year for the contests in three markets. That's 30. You know, 30 related posts where they give us a little story on their their horse or their dog or their ID and then we use that.

Speaker 2
You can see that in in when we ask for photography and we leverage that quite a bit in our catalog. So you can look at the online catalog.

Speaker 2
Yeah. So one of things we're going to be doing next year is expanding that to the sports and school arena. There's other issues related to that because we have to get sign off on use of there, you know, for kids and stuff like that. But basically that we use to generate a lot of really some good photography actually that stores are very, very into their animals and their events and they take very good pictures and we're using that.

Speaker 2
Plus they each have a little story. So that's one of the things we're going to leverage more this year than we have in the past. That's one of my objectives.


Speaker 2
Yeah. Let's see. Tracking performance in reporting is the most important indicator of sales right now. But but basically, that's kind of a it's hidden because we've been doing price increases which have naturally increased the sales. So so I look at sales, I look at orders from the well, okay, I look at conversion rate, you know, which puts the concept of, you know, the visits to the site, how many are converting.

Speaker 2
Yeah, Yeah. And those are, those are the biggest ones. Now I also want to see this year a significant increase in new visitors.

Speaker 2
Okay. Specifically, you know that there's a lot of other things you can track, but in the end they lead to these things. To me, that's one of the things like when we get customize are in place, I want to be looking at, you know, the time that they're spending on the pages and if, you know, potentially if we can figure out how to single out those people to see if if they have a different conversion performance than the non customizer users.

Speaker 2
Right. Or so there's going to be some specific things I want to point out in the tracking. Okay. We do Yeah. We use are going to be using. Yeah. For more I think the numbers are more or you know more reasonable in line now with what they should be. We're still not tracking everything but the other thing I look at is what products are selling the product performance and it's a year to year.

Speaker 2
A lot of the comparisons are same time versus same time last year. You know, and Google helps us do that. Also, I use the Shopify reports to do that.


Speaker 2
Yeah. Now you know, so that's what I'll give you. That information is going to to get the market related product information, I need to go to our legacy system, do some queries there, visits where we categorize customers to the markets where but for the product reporting, actually just the sheer product reporting you can get just by going to Shopify.

Speaker 2
The product reports are very good. Yeah, Yeah. So basically I'll get I'll send you that information on products and I'll give you a one set that's related to the different markets. So you can see the import side. It's going to take a while to put that together, but I'll do that. Okay. The promotions, the major one is the winter sale, but we're going to be doing promotions on specific products through the summer and into the fall.

Speaker 2
Typically, we do a short summer sale.

Speaker 1
It's like introductions.

Speaker 2
No, actually we do two. It depends on what our capacity is. Okay, We do Memorial Day and Labor Day related sales.

Speaker 1
Okay.

Speaker 2
If we have capacity and that's a sitewide.

Speaker 1
I understand that. That is also a major hit. So we are focusing on the brands and or assets and also we have to consider the fact the ability to create medals of trophies out of that site.

Speaker 2
Yes. Now, yeah. So what we do in our email strategy is we kind of rotate through the different product lines so that people are seeing what we conquer and then content, strategy and resources, you know, basically they are experts at holding their events and we really can't tell them anything more about their events, but they expect us to be the product experts and provide, I think, kind of content we can do is provide different information about the products that they may be interested in.

Speaker 2
And I think potentially product videos and things like that because we're really into telling them how to hold a dog show is not what we need to do. They know how to do that. Yeah, right. And tell you I'm going to hold an equestrian that there they already know how to do that now. So what we can do is help them with the product choices.

Speaker 2
What do other people do? Like if you look at the Silver blog, that's an example of going through the whole silver product line, summarize it and hopefully try to make it simple so they can see the major types of products that we have and what you know, what and when you know how to use them, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2
Yeah. So yeah, because I keep on you know every time I prioritize my resource, I always go back to equestrian dog and ribbons. Right? Then we could be doing a lot more in the other categories to incrementally build up our traffic and sales potential Now.

Speaker 2
Well, what I think what you just said is a good point that especially as Google and Bay and, you know, Microsoft tried to figure out how to incorporate more AI in their search results. Yeah, it's going to be in the format of asking questions, I think. Right. Yeah. So one of these I was thinking and going through this new SEO new AFAIK, you know we're going to be using it looks like is that on product pages two or collection pages.

Speaker 2
So I'm thinking some of the content could be in the form of FAA here is which could be beneficial to the customer and give us some say SEO leverage so that if you agree that's one of the things like we should talk about more about. To me, how do you think, given what you've seen with that if you tool that that's possible.


Speaker 2
Yeah. I think there's potentially a little leverage in that fake you kind of format from both the customer and the SEO perspective and that yeah. Basically on the fake is that's one of the things that you know, I can get an internal resource working on. She actually is our works on our creative but she has experience in manufacturing so she knows the products.

Speaker 2
Okay So that's one of the things that she's going to be working on the fake once we go live with that. And then one thing I was thinking of is the first thing is to get, you know, replace our current F excuse with what we do, But seems like there is opportunities to leverage this from SEO and especially it looks like there is features in the product where we could serve a specific set of epic cues that we like up here at the bottom of the Rosette collection page.

Speaker 2
You know, things like that. Yeah. Which, which gets back to Yeah, we don't really have any content expertise internally anyway as a people because we don't like write content. We have people that know the product, we have people that, you know, related to email in the product, but we don't really have a content writer who knows who can be.

Speaker 2
And to me, I think that's one of the most difficult things there is to do for our business. And I tried for six months with this other company and there are issues with it just because a think, you know, it's only a different person every time. But the other was that they were trying to write about how to tell people how to hold a dog show.

Speaker 2
I told, You can't do that. We don't that's not our expertise. Right. So trying to find a content creator that this is tough, I don't know exactly that was never been successful doing this on the outside. I don't have anyone on the marketing team that can consistently write good content. They're all doing other jobs, right. So, so that's kind of been always the issue and trying to find the right resource.

Speaker 2
So in 2023 I was using this other company and know we kind of came up with an agreement of how many, how many pages to do a month and, you know, establish a price for that. And basically we got through some of the collection pages, which you can see it's already been implemented and we had some pretty good results on some of that.

Speaker 2
The problem was I had to rewrite most of it.

Speaker 2
That is you know, they were like they did a blog or Copyblogger or because I couldn't publish because they included, you know, photography, which was great of the product, but it wasn't with our product. Okay. So there were several things that were wrong with that. It's just on the content strategy. I'm still up in the air is how to deal with that directly.

Speaker 2
One of the things that I have been thinking about is just hiring someone who has writing, you know, capability on a contract basis to come to the office like a day, a week to spend time with our people to learn. You guys spend time learning the product, to write content for us. And, and yeah, we have like, for instance, we have a lot of mentors, but they all don't have same characteristics.

Speaker 2
You can't group them together. So any case on the content strategy, I still believe it's best to do the collections first.

Speaker 2
That's it. If, if on the product page you can add a tab, then we can start adding selective content on the top products there. And then this fake news thing, if we can, you know, expand that and then we can kind of work on the fake news ourselves. You know, we have the expertise with those that will be product knowledge related fake news, which we can handle.

Speaker 2
No problem. Okay. Anyway, those are the things that I still think, you know, the priority again, on the collections and then the blogs like writing more things like the Silver blog. Well, I think would be helpful from what you've said. And I think that's that's something where we have the expertise, you know, with a content writer, you know, to write those on that one.

Speaker 2
I gave a very explicit outline and they followed it in the matter of going through the And the reason we picked Silver was because we never spend any time talking about silver. Right. And that's that's a product area that we're we have a that that's one of one of the things that we do well although it's a smaller product line right now.

Speaker 2
Yeah. Anyway, so that's, that's where I'm in and this is the content strategy is the thing I've struggled with the most basic. I had to figure out how to get that done.


Speaker 2
What.


Speaker 2
Yeah, it's tough. It's love. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So like seasonal trends, I went through that a little bit and that. Yeah, competitor strategy. I'll give you the highlights here and I'll send you some things, some thoughts basically on the competitor strategy. I look at the different markets here and the different product lines that are, you know, the top sellers in those markets.

Speaker 2
And I'll give you a top level just a quick review. Okay. Okay. Okay. So for equestrian, again, that's our biggest market. That's where we sell the most rosettes because it's a very profitable product. You know, a lot of people cannot compete with us at the volume we can do, right? Yeah, right. And they're much smaller. So we have competitive advantage in equestrian because we know equestrian.

Speaker 2
We have a lot of equestrian, very loyal customers or continue some of our competitors or are not producing well and so we have manufacturing capacity. So we spend the most money in the equestrian market trying to get more equestrian customers and keeping the ones we have happy. Really when you look at competitors, we have a few that are specific, but none of the ones that you've mentioned online or vocal are really significant threats to sell process.

Speaker 2
We have other companies that don't really even have an online presence that are that are presence, but they don't have a significant online street presence for producing custom rosettes. So for so our forte for for the equestrian market, custom rosettes, custom sashes, riders, numbers and we spend we sell a variety of others, I'll give you that. But the competitors that do that are very few and many of them are not on that list that you provided online because they are more traditional competitors.

Speaker 2
They have, you know, a U.S. manufacturing facility for ribbons, you know, small to medium size that we compete with in different ways. But they're online competitors. That's why it's been interesting that the online competitors are a totally different group.


Speaker 2
Yeah, there or there. Through this, there are word of mouth relationships. They developed. There's a lot of competitors not that have been around as long as us, but nearly been around 40 or 50 years. 30 years. Then people turn to you to the event. So what happens is people tend to be very loyal on the rosette side. Yeah, Yeah.

Speaker 2
Okay. So that's so the competitors in for equestrian, there's very few direct competitors online for custom. Do I look at for custom rosettes. Well now for stock products, stock rosettes and stock ribbons, there is quite a few that's a smaller part of what we do as H. But we're starting to sell a lot of those products on Amazon stock off the shelf products.

Speaker 2
And we're competing with a whole group of, I think, Chinese competitors that are just creating a storefront Amazon and, you know, shipping them for FBA. And so some of our competition is coming from Amazon on stock ribbons on rosettes or is there a pro or major competitor there? But there are marketplace for us too.


Speaker 2
They are not I don't know if well they're all in the US I think basically because the Amazon need to have a call center either because people are is right. So if you have products, I think what's happening is you know the ribbons are being made and manufactured in China, shipped into the Amazon warehouse in the so there's a lot more competitors that you have listed there, but they never pop up on the radar screen that you you know for a typical because they don't compete with a an independent website themselves, right?

Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah. I just kind of point out there's a group of competitors out there that that are invisible kind of accepted design that actually they're selling a large number of stock ribbons and rosettes. So we compete with them directly on Amazon and we have a decent business stock business within. Hargis. Okay. So then going into the dog market, you know, the competitors most of the competitors are off line competitors, just like in the equestrian market, the top product line sold to dog market are rosettes and I would actually sell even more elaborate rosettes to the dog shows.

Speaker 2
And now here dog shows, most of them have lower volume requirements for us, as you know, the order of 5000 versus thousands. So I see you'll see a lot of people making rosettes and small scale, but very highly customized rosettes. And we really don't compete in that category. The customized stuff we don't do, it doesn't fit our our profile, our manufacturing profile.

Speaker 2
But one of the other set of competitors in the dog market is not strong, though, in online and in that is they are called dog show superintendents. So there's a small group of companies that will make the rosettes and they'll go to the event and hold the event for people to do a dog show and doesn't want to take a promotion.

Speaker 2
Yeah, well, it's like it's like this. They outsource all the work. So if a club is holding a dog show and they really don't want to do any of the work, they'll also do a company that does everything. It's turnkey, right? Yeah. Yeah. So what's happening though is I think we think that it's a smaller and smaller part of the market because they charge quite a bit for the rosettes.

Speaker 2
And so that's where we have a leverage that we have large lists of leads we build catalogs to where we have a superior online presence to most of the competitors in the dog market, but in most of the competitors are offline and they are online. So like, for instance, well, I can't give you a too many that on the list here, but basically dog shows, that's what we sell, primarily rosettes of beers.

Speaker 2
We sell a mix of products, but we sell a lot of flat ribbons. That's where we sell a lot of flat ribbons, you know, fairs, forage agricultural events. And there we have a lot of competitors. They can go to a number of competitors to buy these flat ribbons. We spoke with our 40 is customization of those ribbons them.

Speaker 2
And so basically there's a there's a come a competitor that is not on their list that they don't I don't think they do much online. I get them in the the ribbon comparison list under some rest. They're called stats stats Awards.


Speaker 2
They have a full range of products and they sell rosettes as well as flat ribbons on them. Their online presence. They can't be selling a lot of them online, but they do have a decent website and so they're kind of a competitor. There you know. So you notice I haven't mentioned Crown yet in any of this. Right now they have a very broad product line.

Speaker 2
But when it comes to special sizing in these niches, you know, your comments on them are correct. We're much more in depth in those niches than they are. So that's unfair. So we sell a lot of medals to fairs, we sell some trophies, we'll have ribbons and rosettes. If you look at our spherical, we have a big number of rosettes there, but it's really the flat ribbons that really kind of are the big seller for that market.

Speaker 2
And then for schools. So now those are the top top ones for schools. Now we sell medals and flat ribbons primarily. Okay. Those are the top two product lines. And Jones is the major school like a dedicated competitor. But really, schools can buy from any of those. It's really you know, Jones has some specific medal designs related to schools, but so does Crown.

Speaker 2
So their crown competes a lot in all, the trophy companies have a very full line of diecast medals and that's what the schools buy. Primarily. If a school comes to us, they may want a customized medal, but it's a much lower volume. And we do sell a lot of flat ribbons to schools. And that's all these other guys, right.

Speaker 2
And we have several stock ribbons related to schools. Is this Jones? Is this correct? So it's not as much of a niche. They go anywhere that they can get the best price. So that's the characteristics of that market, though. They're shopping on best price and in some cases it isn't out of the school budget. Teachers are buying things themselves because they don't have a budget right?

Speaker 2
So then after schools, you know, it's the other sports we've we have a we've we mail catalogs to swimming in gymnastics or gymnastics slash dance. So within the sports we have a stronger foothold in swimming and gymnastics, particularly in swimming. And there we compete with Hastie you mentioned on the list is strong and some of those events like swimming and gymnastics, but then so is everyone else.

Speaker 2
Like the ones you saw there, They can buy, they buy a lot of metals and they buy a lot of trophies right now. They'll buy some trophies from us. But Crown has better pricing and better delivery. So that's where all the sporting events is. The forte for like Crown Awards, Trophy Depot, all the trophy related companies have medals, plaques and trophies.

Speaker 2
And most of all, I think most of what they sell are into those sporting events, a variety of sporting events. And that's our that's probably our weakest segment. We have products to offer to them, but we don't focus on them. And then the last subsegment is business recognition, which is more like our, you know, people in the human resource department buying awards for service anniversaries or specific events within the company.

Speaker 2
And so we have called a list of, you know, people we mail all the time and we do get, you know, a variety of people from, you know, business or, you know, nonprofit organizations led by small volumes of products there. There is a larger mix of products here, as you would imagine. But we still sell a lot of rosettes into the businesses because I see them and it's, you know, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2
So the competitors there are all the ones you have on the list plus more. Any best are typically looking for a good price looking in. A lot of them are though for the employee recognition we say we think they're you know all of this being organized or run by the the h.r. Departments a lot or they're giving a budget to certain you know, certain business department managers are making their own decision on awards.

Speaker 2
So they asking how much.


Speaker 2
Motivators. I'll give you those numbers. It's like compared to the top three area really falls off dramatically. And the problem is there for us as a Kellogg heritage is that's a very large market, so hard for us to directly address. And there's the the largest number of competitors are in that market. There's a lot of businesses, right. It's hard to target.

Speaker 2
So we aren't as successful because we're very successful. Then we can target a niche market and focus on them. But there's too many. Yeah, we haven't found a good niche within business. We do a little bit, you know, some sales which is good and we want to do more. But it's like it's they're not typically if you look at our website and our product line, it's oriented toward equestrian fare and you know, in animal events, right?

Speaker 2
So we've, we've done that because that's where the money is for us or else we participate in those markets. But and we've participated in those markets for 30 years plus, but they never have grown significantly off line. So we really have a spare resource just based on our forte and our competitive strengths are, you know, our whole manufacturing plant in Missouri, about 85% of it is dedicated toward manufacturing rosettes and ribbons.

Speaker 2
Yeah, we have a smaller department related to engraving products and things that in metals, okay, But that's where our investment has been and that's where our forte is in some of these other markets. It's not what they want, Right. So we have some some products that they may want, but we don't spend as much there because the return on investment isn't there because, you know, they can go to Crown and get hundreds of choices for dye care smells.

Speaker 2
So if they're looking for a diecast metal, we really can't compete with that. They're looking for a customized metal. We can compete with that pretty well, right?


Speaker 2
Yes. So yeah yeah yeah. Schools right now our top seller on Amazon our field day ribbons which is the spring school event. Right. And schools have a high, you know they they buy a lot in the spring as they're getting ready with schools closed and they do the field days then in the fall they start buying again with their budgets get started.

Speaker 2
So they have a little bit different seasonality than what I told you or, you know, the horse shows in the dog shows and fairs. Yeah.



Speaker 2
Not really. Yeah. It's it's pretty consistent through the year. Yeah. The exception is that at the end of the year which a lot of times happens and they, they do end of year stuff. Yeah. So that's, you know they do those kinds of things, so you'll see a blip there. But other than that, it's pretty consistent through the year.

Speaker 2
And actually in the fall and winter weeks, you know, there's good business there that it doesn't go through the strong peak like our other markets. Okay.


Speaker 2
I agree. The the one blog article, the other of the two is about employee recognition. So.


Speaker 2
So that was the idea there. And a lot can be probably written around that theme is giving people ideas I think, you know. And along that line too, we can probably give teachers, you know, school teachers ideas about awards and show the different. So there's, there's things that we can do there. I think definitely.


Speaker 2
Yes. Yeah. It's, it's just there's a lot more competition there. You know why the competitors have much broader product line. So in putting together the whole strategy, the manner of you know, how much time you spend on the core markets, so delivering their return, how much further can we take them? And so we spend the money there versus developing these other markets.

Speaker 2
I think we need to do a mix of things. It comes down to where we spend our time and effort. That should be the discussion, you know, in the final report. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So this, this, this last item here, customer reviews and testimonials. Yeah, we show it the testimonials in a few places on the website, primarily in the home page.

Speaker 2
I think people click on those or we also show them in some of the emails that we send out, you know, just kind of sprinkle them in. So we have one email that I can share with you. I can show you a that is two leads people haven't bought for the smart recognition. I'll send you guys a copy of that.

Speaker 2
So you see it's it's in kind of introducing them to H and customers testimonials are a big thing there.



Speaker 2
Yeah, I think so too. It's just yeah, just again, you know, when we look at a lot of competitors with a lot of products they're buying from distributors, which are all the same. So it's like it's hard to differentiate in that world too, whereas it's easier for us to differentiate from the competition with what we have in the other markets, I think.

Speaker 2
But we have shied away from it in the past, mainly because, you know, it came from a a catalog marketing strategy where we really couldn't effectively target these people. So we had we had low response rates on our catalogs. And so we not translate that to the web. There could be a bigger, much bigger opportunity here that we are pursuing.

Speaker 2
So I think that's part of the strategy. It's worth seeing if we do something there.

Speaker 1
Yeah, as you said, I think even with the ribbon, its market there is opportunity because we are providing customized solution. But I've said maybe if you weren't promoting to business, we are linked to that something the customers, etc. but I think it is more effective.

Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Very good. Well it was up pretty late here, so I think that's you need some information on the markets and the product. So you have that to get an overall feel for the mix.