Finding a Pace
Looking Back
I didn’t hit the development goals I’d set for myself in August. Some other things got in the way, I was working way too hard and got kind of burnt out, and I found the family of firearms I’d chosen to develop holsters for in August to be particularly challenging to adapt to (the Sig P365 forced me to learn a new CAD workflow).
I’m probably going to have to adopt a development pace of releasing product sets for one model of firearm every two weeks. When I said resources and time were limited last month, I was not kidding. I need to sleep, and I’m going to occasionally need that extra week to get fitment right. As long as I’m actually working on the development consistently, this should be attainable.
Looking Forward
What I’m doing right now, in the more general sense, is attempting to build the core of the business before I start marketing more directly. I think I’ve got a design philosophy that genuinely makes a more comfortable holster, but Mockingbird isn’t generating sales yet, nor could it cope with a surge of interest. Of course, you can’t build capacity without money to invest, and it doesn’t make sense to build capacity if you’re not expecting sales, but it’s hard to market yourself if you don’t already have the capacity (though large corporations sometimes do). Chicken and the egg, and unfortunately what often happens is you embrace a little pain to build up cash (just like life!).
Right now, the biggest gap I can see is that I don’t have much of a catalog. It’d be really lame for me to talk up this thing only for you to land on the website and find that I don’t have something for you. And believe me, I’m going to need to be able to talk this thing up, I’ve seen the analytics. I see two parts to this gap: the “mold list” and the color options.
The “mold list” is something I want to work on right now, but that part of the gap is not going to close fast. I need the experience of designing holsters for a broad array of firearms anyway, but if my sustainable pace is 2 weeks per model, that’s only 26 models a year. Some folks have three times that in their mold list, but some holsters have a mold list only slightly larger than that. So… I just have to get to work.
The other side of the gap is the colors, which I don’t want to release just yet. My data processes are all 100% manual, so I can’t afford to blow up my SKU count like that until I can relax a little on the technical development pace. So, until then, light grey will remain the one color I offer. Why not black? You don’t wear black under a white shirt unless you want people to see it, and black isn’t any cheaper for me.
I know where I’m at, and I know what I’m attempting to do. There’s plenty of good holster makers already out there, but if you’re reading this, I appreciate your consideration.
September Focus
Finish the P365 family, then revisit what needs revisiting.
If I get through that, the next new-to-me model on the roadmap is the venerable Glock 19 (gen 5 and older). It’s not a gun I’d carry, but it’s the largest one I could reasonably conceive of somebody choosing to, particularly AIWB, which is my technical specialty.
-🦀
