Apparently our specials worked pretty well. We pretty much crushed our expectations for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Take a look at our shipping area on Monday with all of the orders from over the weekend:
That prior record of 73 items shipped out in a day is now somewhere around 130. Then we followed that up by absolutely killing Cyber Monday and doing single-day records in terms of number of sales and revenue. If you take out a fluky $6k order we had once through Tastefully Driven, Monday probably doubled any other single-day revenue. Pretty, pretty good.
I couldn’t help but walk around with a smile on my face these past two days. We made a really really significant amount of money in these last five days. I can’t even imagine what Black Friday and Cyber Monday will bring in ‘09 and ‘10.
It feels like the culmination of our hard work. We went through the startup phase where we didn’t quite know how or if we’d survive. Then we turned a corner when we focused on e-commerce and moved into the warehouse. We turned another corner a few months ago when we gave ourselves a nice raise and could say we made a decent living. This feels like we’re turning the next corner, the one where we can really start to dominate our niches.
One thing about this job, it never gets dull. Every freaking day is more exciting than the next.
Oh, and just how efficient is our packing process? This morning the four of us banged out all 50 something Cyber Monday orders in a cool 2 hours. We’re getting to the point where we’re so good at it that we really don’t need to hire anyone for a while. If on the most chaotic day we spend 2 hours in the warehouse, well, I can live with that for a while.
Anyway, despite the long hours the past few days I’m totally on a high right now. It feels so damn good to see the company you pour your heart and soul into growing so quickly right before your eyes. It’s almost surreal. Even more so considering we’re doing it in a down economy. It feels like a long time coming, but we’re definitely enjoying it now that it’s here.
P.S. – the competition definitely noticed and is starting to take some swings at us, but I’ll save that for my next post 
Congratulations!
Thanks for writing about your business experience. Its always interesting to see how others are doing and provides some motivation…
Congratulations! I was hoping you’d post today (technically yesterday at this point), and I got my wish.
Congrats man, great job!
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