We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kate Frachon. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kate below.

Alright, Kate thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you share a customer success story with us?

We have so many customer success stories! That is a wonderful thing about selling products that help people achieve their goals. In particular, we have seen many customers use our Goal Planner to accomplish huge things over the course of a year.

One customer wrote in and told us that they had set a goal to ride a unicycle around the world, and used our planner to go from the idea stage to learning to unicycle (yes, they didn’t actually know how to ride a unicycle when they set the goal!) to unicycling the length of Taiwan and South Korea, and become the first person in the world to unicycle in North Korea!

Another customer told us that she and her husband used our planner to plot out 12 months for their business, and actually exceeded their goals using the planner. As real estate investors, the planner allowed them to track details like meetings, but more importantly, it allowed them to stay connected to their big picture goals and not get distracted along the way. As a result, they achieved 3x what they had expected to that year!

Kate, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Ink+Volt started in 2014 as the brainchild of Kate Matsudaira, a technology executive and startup founder who has been on the quest for the perfect notebook for more than 10 years. She launched a Kickstarter for her own planner — now called the Ink+Volt Planner — and after exceeding her goal by over $100,000, the rest was history.

That first Kickstarter was entirely packed and shipped out of Kate’s dining room, with pallets of planners stacked high in her garage. Needless to say, we made fast friends with our local post office branch.

Ink+Volt has now become a passionate community of people enthusiastic about productivity, goals, and success. Our goal is to make you more successful in work and in life. We design and create products that will help you on your journey toward success, including our best-selling Ink+Volt Planner.

We have studied what it takes to be your best, and we believe that having the right tools is essential to achieving your dreams. Whether it’s a planner, a calendar, a pen, or a thank you card that’s exactly right, it is our mission to give you exactly what you need to make the best possible impact. Even as most of the world goes digital, we understand the power of writing things down and of using tools that you can hold in your hand.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

One of the most important things to us as a brand is to deliver an incredibly high level of value in everything we create – not just our products but in everything we do. This has been essential for our success. For many years, our blog and our email list were the main places that our sales came from because we invested heavily in creating uniquely high quality content, and delivering that content for free as widely as we could.

We knew that our customers were looking for help in becoming more successful, and we could stand out from the crowd by delivering better content than anyone else. This strategy worked for us because we built a ton of trust with our customer base. We were proving for free why they should invest in our products, and we grew our reach through word-of-mouth and traffic organically.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

For creatives, taking breaks and allowing time for doing nothing is crucial for maintaining and enhancing creativity. Unlike other fields where productivity is often measured by continuous output and visible progress, the creative process requires mental space in order to be able to generate new ideas.

When you step away from your work and do nothing (or do something “mindless” like washing the dishes), your brain processes and synthesizes ideas in the background, often leading to unexpected insights and breakthroughs. This downtime allows your subconscious mind to connect thoughts and experiences, forming new, innovative concepts that might not emerge during periods of intense focus.

Rest is important for everyone, and I actually think everyone would benefit from more time doing nothing in order to do better work! But I know this is something essential for creative professionals.

Contact Info:

• Website: inkandvolt.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/inkandvolt
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inkandvolt/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inkandvolt