Cat Pics All Day – Is It a Good Business Model?

So, in our earlier post, we went through how the business was started. Now it’s time to stay current, and let everyone know how it’s been going for the last few months. Which, unfortunately, has not been great. Far from it in fact. The complete opposite of how it was going to go in our heads. Within a few weeks, we had made ourselves business cards, started a Facebook page, and started posting in the Zazzle forums to try and get our name out there.

It worked! People had provided positive feedback in our comments section, we seemed to be getting a decent amount of traffic to our page, and we are now up to 41 likes on the Zazzle page! If that was our only measure of success, we would be saying were doing quite well for ourselves. But, like most businesses, profits do factor in there somewhere, and right now we have none. Zilch. Nada. A big fat goose egg in the sales department. What is going wrong? We have yet to figure that out. I know we aren’t professional graphic designers or anything. AND we didn’t go to school for business management, marketing, sales, etc. But come on, its cats! We even have a few designs made by a guest contributor (Quinn’s sister), and still nothing. These designs are super cute, and one has a unique vintage feel. If you’d like to see it on more products, let us know!

http://www.zazzle.com/vintage_cat_mug-168613235865782001

http://www.zazzle.com/vintage_cat_bag_wristlet_purses-223080300913630781

We definitely could use some constructive feedback, because we do want this to be successful and create cool designs that people enjoy. It’s not just about the money. It never was with this site, we just wanted to get out there and put our creative side of our brains to the test. Generally people have the “Oh, I could have done that” mentality, and we are guilty of that too, so instead of saying/thinking “We could have done that” we decided to change our attitude to “We did do that, we tried, we put ourselves out there”. Well, here we are. And we’d  like to think some of the stuff we have created is cute and fun. Granted, not everything is going to be purrfect, there is a learning curve after all, but without the sales letting us know which design style to go with, we are floating out there in Zazzle Limbo. And it is not a great feeling. So, if you’re a Zazzler, or a consumer, or both, if you like cats, or if you don’t like cats, please take a look at what we have and comment on our blog (Not the Zazzle page please). If you like what you see, letting us know by purchasing is even better!

Once we get established, we are hoping to get some different promotional ideas started.  One idea that we have tossed around is to have donations made to different animal foundations using the funds from the sales for a specific month or from a certain product. The donations would be made based on voting done right here on our blog! Unfortunately, we can’t start ideas like that yet without any money. And we don’t want to do something like that without getting an idea of what people would be happy purchasing. So, the dilemma continues. In the meantime, we are just continuing with the development of new designs in the hope that something eventually clicks, and we get out to the right audience.

To everyone who works hard and tries out their new ideas, we wish you the best of luck! Feel free to share your stories, we would love to hear them!

- Alice & Quinn