We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rob and Sarah Meyers a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Rob and Sarah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the toughest things about entrepreneurship is that there is almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?

The most frequent issue that catches us off guard is actually our own ideas for product improvement. We started slowly and gave ourselves plenty of time for research, development and experimentation. It wasn’t until we were confident in what we were making and proud of the results that we opened up to the public.

However, it didn’t take long before we thought of an improvement to our casting process that would further reduce bubbles in the finished resin. The initial products were great and the bubbles were so small most people probably didn’t even notice them. They’re an inescapable part of working with resin. But even a small reduction felt like a worthwhile improvement and we always strive to make the best products that we can. So we replaced all of our existing stock using the new method and breathed a sigh of relief that we finally had the process perfected.

And then it happened again, this time with an improvement to the ornament painting process. And then again, and again with other aspects of various designs. Despite our lengthy R&D phase, we were still finding ways to make incremental improvements that would lead to wasted stock as we didn’t feel right about selling something that was only 99% as good as the new stuff.

It has become a constant struggle to balance the need for inventory against overproducing so we’re not wasteful when the next incremental improvement is discovered. We really thought that once we had a design we could shift entirely to just making it. But our personalities seem unable to let go of experimentation.

Rob and Sarah, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We’re a husband and wife team that make resin crafts of tropical locations. We make ornaments, coasters and art that feature silhouettes of islands and pieces of paradise that hold a special place in people’s hearts.

The first moment we saw it, we fell in love with St. John in the US Virgin Islands. We visited as often as we could, but it was never enough. We started looking for things to place around our home that would remind us of paradise but just couldn’t find the perfect piece. It was then that we decided to try creating our own art that would resemble how St. John would look from a plane. We hand-cut a large silhouette of the island from wood and covered it in a material that looked like tropical foliage. After building a mold around the cut-out, we poured a layer of Caribbean blue resin around the island and produced our first piece of resin wall art. We were hooked.

Next we started making coasters featuring the same silhouette, all the while honing our skills and improving our process. It didn’t take long for us to realize that there were undoubtedly others who loved our little island that might be interested in what we were making. We decided to open an Etsy shop and see how it went. It went surprisingly well. In a short time we expanded our offerings to many different islands, setup our own website, got our products into retail stores and we’re still expanding. Despite the growth, remembering why we started is easy when we interact with our customers. We’re all just island-obsessed people trying to share our love of paradise!

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

We had some early success on Etsy which proved that there was a market for what we make. But we knew that our niche really lends itself to retail shops located on the islands featured in our products. Getting our stuff in front of tourists while they’re visiting their favorite place was the key to scaling things up. We decided to make our first attempt on St. John since it’s a place we know well and visit frequently. We selected the shops that we thought would be the best fit, packed up samples and set aside a little time on our vacation to drop them off.

As I’m sure any businessperson knows, dropping off a packet and samples is far less effective than actually setting up a meeting with the owner/buyer and make a face to face pitch. But the latter requires confidence and that’s something we were very short on in the beginning. So we timidly dropped off our samples with the cashiers along with a note to the owners explaining what we do and why we thought that the shop was a good fit for our items.

We didn’t feel great about our cowardice, but we decided to focus on enjoying our vacation and hoped that we’d hear back from someone while we were still on island. We didn’t. So we hoped we’d here something in the next couple weeks. We didn’t. We started to think that we had missed an opportunity and our confidence fell even lower. The assumed next step, cold-contacting retailers on other islands seemed like a dim prospect.

Months later, after we had basically given up and forgotten about our attempt, we got an email from the owner of the shop that we had been most excited about. She had received the samples and was interested in carrying ornaments! It was a watershed moment for us and finally gave us the boost of confidence that we needed to start scaling up.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

We sell on Etsy as well as our own website. We started with Etsy because the barrier to entry is so low and it’s a great place to do product validation. The listing fees are small and the audience that the platform brings gives new sellers a chance to get in front of eyeballs. Our experience has been very positive and fortunately (knock on wood) we haven’t run into any significant issues. However, we understand that putting all your eggs in a single basket, especially a 3rd-party basket, can be dangerous. That, plus the promise of lower fees, convinced us to set up our own website as well.

Rob has a tech background, so we built our own site to save money. It was definitely cost effective, but even with a history of coding, unless you work with web development frequently it can be rather tedious to track down and resolve issues on your own. Aside from getting the site off the ground, the hardest part is definitely attracting an audience. Especially since our customers tend to be one-offs with minimal opportunity for repeat buyers, marketing can be a challenge. This is still something that we’re working on, but the bulk of our revenue comes from wholesale, so it’s not a pressing issue.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.racingthought.com
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