-
Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
-
If that sounds like something you're into, you can subscribe to blog updates via RSS or email, or follow me on Twitter. You can get in touch by leaving a comment or through email at
Category Archives: Detailed Image
Taking Care of Your Best Customers
When it comes to our customers, it’s easy for our attention to gravitate to the small minority who contact us repeatedly: the ones who love to chat about detailing, the ones who have crazy purchasing scenarios (you know, the guy who wants to dropship a gift to his brother-in-law, wants it delivered precisely on January 25th, wants a hand-written card included in it, and wants to pay for his order using 4x $25 VISA gift cards that he received from his step-grandmother for Hanukkah), and the ones who love to complain about anything/everything. The reality is that this small subset … Continue reading
A Huge (& Highly Efficient) Cyber Monday!
That picture says it all. I couldn’t stand back far enough to get all of the boxes in the shot! I’m writing this at 4:45 PM on Monday, so I’m not sure whether or not today will break our record for sales in a day. I think it will based on our pace, but if it doesn’t, it will be close*. Regardless, we’ve already surpassed last November in sales, and the year as a whole surpassed 2010 a while back so in some ways it’s kind of insignificant. To me, the real significant thing about today was just how easy … Continue reading
Holiday Shopping Season Starts Now!
You know what that means for us – a really really busy month. Like most retailers it seems like we keep starting our holiday sales earlier and earlier each year. My inbox this week was full of early Black Friday promotions. I guess technically our early early holiday sale in October was the beginning, but the real holiday craziness starts today with our always-interesting 25%/20%/15% off 3-day sale: The last time we ran this sale I was on vacation and the first day crashed the site. It was kind of a nightmare. That was in mid-2009 just after launching our … Continue reading
A Big Deal For Detailed Image
Today we’re really excited to be the featured partner for the launch of Car and Driver Magazine’s Dashboard Deals as well as Road and Track Magazine’s First Look Rewards, their new Groupon-like daily deal programs. I’m traveling this week. More to come on this when I return.
How We Use Pre-Sales to Improve Cash Flow
I’ve written before about how the cash flow cycle of inventory can be the death of e-commerce companies of all sizes. One of the things we’ve done this year with surprising success is pre-selling items before we get them in stock. As soon as we place an order with a distributor, the product goes up on our site. Most of the time the description just says “coming soon” and the picture is just something like this: This isn’t all that intuitive of a practice. I mean, you could argue that it’s not worth the effort of even posting it until … Continue reading
A Milestone For Our Shopping Cart Software
Upon finishing a programming project to improve how we manage out of stock products and then integrate it with our shipping estimates (see image above), I completed all of the major initiatives that we wanted to complete in 2011 to improve our shopping cart software that powers Detailed Image. The reason why we’re at this point and it’s only June 5th is a pretty simple one – most of the important stuff is finally finally done! We’ve built a stable, scalable, easy-to-manage and easy-to-use platform that will serve us well for years to come. There’s nothing “major” left to do…at … Continue reading
What a Spring!
Traditionally, the busiest months of the year for Detailed Image have been March and November because 1) those are the months that demand is highest (in March because of Spring time, November because of the holidays), and 2) that’s when we run our craziest sales. Ever since I can remember, March has always leapfrogged the previous November as our highest grossing month in company history, and then when November comes along it beats March, and the pattern continues on the next year. What’s made 2011 so special is that after a record-breaking March, April was essentially even (slightly less revenue, … Continue reading
How Our Team Pulled Together Quickly For Today’s Big Product Launch
At 6 PM EST tonight Detailed Image was among the first retailers to begin selling the new Meguiar’s DA Microfiber Correction System. Meguiar’s is arguably the most well-known detailing brand in the world, and this product line has been receiving tons of hype. The whole process has been fascinating to watch unfold. For the most part, everything has happened within the last week. Everyone has been working their ass off to ensure that at 6:01 PM tonight we had done everything we could to have an exhaustive online presence for these hot new products. My role in the whole thing … Continue reading
Another Record-Breaking Cyber Monday for Detailed Image
Today we completed another killer end to November. Much like in previous years (2009, 2008), we really nailed the prime Holiday shopping period that now stretches from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. We surpassed last year’s revenue for that stretch and we had our largest single day in company history yesterday on Cyber Monday. This month also broke our company record for revenue in a month, and early this month we set our company record for revenue in a year. All of that is even more impressive when you consider that in January we closed Tastefully Driven, stopped … Continue reading
Testing a New Promo Upsell for the Holidays
I’ve mentioned on a few different occasions that offering free shipping all of the time, say for orders over $100 or $200 doesn’t work well for a business like ours. We’re in a unique industry where weight doesn’t correlate at all to money spent – you can spend $60 on three heavy gallons that cost us maybe $20 to ship to CA, or you can spend $200 on a wax that costs us $8 to ship to CA. We’ve found that as a policy it’s much more fair to everyone if we charge you based on weight, not on amount … Continue reading