Nobody Owes You a Sale Just Because You're Small

Nobody owes you a sale because you are small. I say that as somebody who is very small indeed.

I see a lot of guilt-tripping from wee businesses. Shop small or we disappear. A real person does a happy dance when you order. I get where it comes from. I have been skint and scared and refreshing the orders page at midnight. But it is the wrong way round.

A customer is not doing charity. They are paying money for something they want. And if they pick me over a giant warehouse, I am the lucky one in that exchange. Not them.

Supporting small businesses is not charity

When somebody buys a belt off me, they are not sponsoring a struggling artist in a cold studio. They needed a belt. They looked at the options. They picked the one made by hand in Aberdeen out of a rope that used to hold climbers, and they paid full price for it.

That is a trade. A good one. Nobody got rescued.

The minute I ask people to buy out of pity, two bad things happen. First, I have told them the product cannot stand up on its own. Second, I have made the whole thing awkward, and nobody comes back to the person who made them feel guilty last time.

So the bar stays exactly where it is for everybody else. A recycled climbing rope belt has to be a good belt first. It has to outlast the one from a big-box store. If it does not, the recycled bit means nothing and the story is just noise.

So instead of guilt, I give stuff away

Here is the bit I actually want you to steal.

I built one product on purpose to be cheap to make. The rope heart keychain. A couple of quid of rope, a few minutes on the machine, done. It was never meant to be a bestseller.

That one decision does three jobs at once.

None of that is a discount, and that is the point. A discount tells people the price was made up in the first place, and once you have knocked thirty percent off you will never sell at full price again. A free wee thing in the box says thank you, costs me less than the discount would have, and nobody feels sold to.

The charity side is the bit I am proudest of. They get the stock for nothing, put it on their counter at full price, and keep the lot. That is more use to anybody than me posting about raising awareness.

Say thanks with something in their hands

A thank you email is fine. Everybody sends one and nobody reads them. A thank you they can hang off their keys is a different animal, because it sits in a pocket for years and it never asks for anything back.

That is the whole trick. Stop asking people to feel sorry for you. Start giving them a reason to tell somebody else about you. One of those is begging and the other is marketing, and they cost about the same.

If you are the customer in this story, you never owed me a thing. Have a wee look at the climbing rope keychains or whatever is available now if you fancy it, or grab a Forma gift card and let somebody else do the picking. And if you do not, that is completely fine. I would far rather you bought nothing than bought something you did not actually want.

Stay classy and remember,
Make Waste Useful.

George