The reality is that this small subset of our customers is not at all indicative of the vast majority who shop with us and rarely contact us. Those are the customers that make our business successful. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to run the business that we run the way that we run it.

One of the ways that we try to say “Thank You” each January is to send all of our best customers from the previous year a $20 gift certificate along with an email thanking them for shopping with us. It’s just a simple way to let them know that we notice how much of their hard-earned money they’ve spent with us, and that we sincerely appreciate it.

Today I sent out this year’s emails. Here’s an example:

Cyber Monday 2011 at Detailed Image

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 it felt. It wasn’t hectic like it was in previous years (see posts from Cyber Monday 2008, 2009, and 2010) but orders were coming in at just as fast of a pace, if not faster. Compared to say 2009 it felt half as busy even though we shipped out more orders.

Throughout the year we put all of these little efficiencies in place to save a minute here and a minute there. We also have worked hard to put together a team of people who work hard but also have a relaxed, positive attitude. All of those things really come together on a day like this. With a really small team – only five of us in the warehouse today – we were able to pack and ship a mountain of orders without rushing or scrambling around.

The number of emails that we received relative to the number of sales has been down as well (yes, we track that number), which again I attribute to all of the little improvements we’ve made throughout the year to our product pages, FAQs, guides, and blogs. It’s a day to celebrate the cumulative impact of all of those little wins.

Oh, and we *almost* filled up the entire FedEx truck. They had to pack the boxes in there pretty tight. I’m looking forward to the day when they have to call in for reinforcements!

*Update 11/29 – The pace picked up considerably in the evening and we ended up destroying our single-day sales record!

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 new shopping cart software. We’ve come a long way since then. While I doubt that the site will crash (and if it does we’re doing some ridiculous volume), I am interested to see the distribution of sales throughout the 3 days. Last time the first day was HUGE – one of our top 5 busiest days ever – and the other two days, despite still being very big sales, were not much better than the average day. The psychology behind a time sensitive, decreasing-in-value sale is fascinating. It’s one of Mike’s favorite things to experiment with.

As I wrote about a few years ago, we start our holiday planning as summer is winding down. While last year was a success, when we entered our planning stage this year we noticed some opportunities that we missed last year. We’re putting every resource we have in to maximizing sales and new customer acquisition during this two-month stretch. It’s such a different phenomenon than the rest of the year. People spend more than they normally do (hence enticing sales work magnitudes better than they do normally), and when it comes to gifts our competition expands to every retailer and not just other auto detailing retailers. If someone is looking for a gift for dad, we’re all of a sudden competing with Home Depot and Best Buy and every other retailer out there, something we’re going to attempt to take advantage of this year.

Mike also did some really smart promotions in October to help increase conversions during the holiday shopping period. For instance, we ran a review contest that resulted in three times more reviews in October than we get in our average month. More quality product reviews on more products = higher conversion rates. And as you can see, we have A LOT of product reviews on our site.

Analyzing data, coming up with new opportunities, planning what we’re going to be doing differently, and the like is all fun, but what really matters is the execution. That starts today.

*We are also interviewing candidates for our open customer service position this week. To make the holidays even crazier, we’re hoping to have this person hired by the end of the year.

**As I went to publish this post I noticed that it’s my 500th since switching the blog over to WordPress. I wonder if I’ll hit 1k? I’ve slowed down a bit with my posting so it probably would take a LONG time.

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 you have it in stock, have it photoed, and have a description written. Make it a one shot deal. No one will buy it without a photo or description anyway…right? This is what we did in the past, and often times weeks would go by from the time we got the product in stock to when it was on the site.

After the success of the big Meguiar’s pre-sale back in February, we realized just how big of a deal this could be. Many of those Meguiar’s products were sold out before we got them in stock. Meaning we had collected the money from our customers before we were even billed for the products! All of a sudden we’ve turned a huge cash flow disadvantage into a huge cash flow advantage. We can take that revenue to pay off the bill and order more. As opposed to starting off in the red, we’re starting off using our profits to fund growth. By the time that first bill was due, we had already sold out of the second batch of products and had a third (or maybe even a fourth) batch on order.

Of course, that was a major product launch that had a ton of hype in the detailing world. We were the first in the industry to get the products up for pre-sale. We ran a pretty big marketing campaign along with it. We could have just been capitalizing on being first to market and this could have been a non-replicable one-time fluke.

We decided to commit to continuing the practice (and by “we” I basically mean everyone else in the company – my role in getting a new product for sale is pretty minimal, sometimes I’m not involved at all). Somewhat surprisingly it continued to work well across all brands and all types of products. To varying degrees of course, but it always worked. Almost nothing we’ve put up for pre-order hasn’t sold. The craziest pre-sales were some of the brushes we recently picked up. We named them ourselves so they have no prior brand affiliation, and yet people still bought them without a picture or description! When you compound all of this across a bunch of different brands, it has allowed us to expand products faster and with more confidence.

Now, if you’re sitting at home thinking “cool, I’m just going to start an e-commerce business and do this” there are a few caveats worth mentioning…even if they should be obvious. First and foremost, this only works once you have an established customer base that trusts your product recommendations, something you can only achieve with years of good will and honesty, right down from your product descriptions to the information on your site and your customer service. You also need to have a good buyer. Greg has been essentially perfect this year. Everything he’s decided to pick up has been a hit. That only comes with years of experience and a skillset that combines some mixture of good data analysis and good industry foresight.

This experience has been one big lesson in “you’ll never know if you don’t try”. We all hold assumptions about our businesses and our customers. Sometimes we’re right and sometimes we’re wrong. As was the case with the Weekly Special last year, this is one of those times where I’m really glad to be wrong.

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 least as of right now. We’re entering a maturity stage for the software, one that I’ve never really experienced, where we can focus on some combination of data-driven small tweaks (lots of split-testing) and some crazy experimental stuff (like completely new interfaces for shopping).

Out of curiosity, I went searching for the first evidence of the start of this shopping cart project. I vividly remember the night when we decided to abandon the osCommerce platform that Detailed Image had been using in 2006/2007 and begin developing our own. Had there been something like Shopify around at the time, there’s no way we would have ever attempted a project of this magnitude. But the shopping cart software in 2007 left a lot to be desired, especially when it came to search-engine-friendliness.

Anyway, I was able to dig up a document called “Time Frame” from July of 2007 where I outlined to my partners the development time frame for the software, in which I estimated that we’d complete and launch the site sometime in late August. The earliest blog post that I can find, Flipping the Switch from 8/11/2007, about dialing up my productivity to hit the launch date, mentions that we were shooting for a September 1, 2007 launch. We eventually ended up launching on 9/7/2007 – the title of my post, DI Up – Completely and Utterly Drained, kind of says it all about how hard we pushed to launch. There was a quick growth spurt right away, and after another solid year of growth we realized that we had outgrown that current setup and the entire thing needed a revamp if we were going to stay on our platform during our next big growth phase. Starting in early 2009, Mike and I built a new shopping cart system, one that fixed most of the problems of the old one while also being compatible with many of the things the old one did right. That launched in May of 2009, and my launch post is pretty similar to that one from 2007 in that I was totally mentally spent. Ever since then we’ve been meticulously chipping away one feature at a time up to the present.

If you showed me back in 2007 what we have now, my jaw would have dropped. Both on the front end and on the back end, we have software that I believe gives us a big competitive advantage. If you look at all of the stuff we’ve tried as a company over the years, we’ve started a lot of things, but for one reason of another have changed directions and never seen them all the way through (all of which I believe in retrospect were good decisions). This is something that we’ve been committed to for four years now, and I think the results of this slow, iterative improvement speak for themselves when you evaluate the product as a whole and the impact it’s had on our growth.

There’s an amazing sense of accomplishment that comes along with sticking with a project like this for so long. It’s very tangible evidence of my progress as a developer and our progress as a company. There’s also a great sense of relief that comes with being at this point. Any time I haven’t been working on the cart, there’s been this guilt in the back of my mind that I need to get back to it because we’re still lacking this important feature or that important feature. There was a time back when I left my job where I spent considerably more time doing SEO and web marketing for us and for our clients than I did doing any sort of development. Looking forward, I’m excited to have the chance to push forward with the development on LockerPulse, re-introduce some of that marketing into my day (for both sites), and tackle new business challenges like hiring our next wave of employees.

What’s made 2011 so special is that after a record-breaking March, April was essentially even (slightly less revenue, slightly higher profits because of less promotions), and then May came along and somewhat unexpectedly blew them both out of the water! While all of this was happening, we had a slew of manufacturer mishaps that created a ton of extra work on our end, and my partners and I each had a comedy of personal issues all arise at the same time. Because we were so busy, we were often in the warehouse on our scheduled days off, and using the late nights and early mornings to get whatever work done that we could. I can safely say that this has been the craziest few months I’ve ever known while running a business.

And while it’s definitely been a bit stressful, the stress associated with growing is not nearly as stressful as wondering where your next paycheck will come from, something we all remember quite vividly. The stress is also lessened by all of the good things that have come out of the past few months aside from the increased sales. It’s great to see everyone working together “selflessly” – chipping in wherever and whenever it’s necessary, doing whatever is necessary. It’s great to see our systems scale, and to fix the minor things that didn’t. It’s great to see our employees step up their game and keep their cool when things are changing every five minutes. And it’s great to see everyone joking around and having a good time together, even on what could be perceived as a rough day. I think that says a lot about the quality of people we have on our team.

Personally, I found myself stressing most about not being able to get to the development projects at the rate that I’m normally used to. That’s when I stop and remind myself that right now we’re reaping the rewards of all of those projects from 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. I mean, the goal of any project is to, in one way or another, bring in more sales. So when that happens, and my day is temporarily filled with more day to day operational stuff, it’s difficult to be too upset about it! We’ve got the right plans in place to hire in the coming months, and there’s almost no way some of the crazy random stuff will happen all at once again, so hopefully by next Spring we’ll be able to easily handle another wave of growth.

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 was relatively minimal. The products are live on our site, but are only available for pre-order since we’re not expecting them in until next week. This created the potential for some new issues to arise. There were a few things I had to tweak in the code to make our pre-order system work a little smoother. I made sure a new PPC campaign was ready to roll right at 6. I made a post on Twitter. And I’ve done anything else I could to support the guys as the details have rapidly unfolded over the past few days.

Todd from Esoteric Auto Detail, who runs our Ask a Pro Blog, has been working with Meguiar’s, along with several of our other authors, to test and refine the products and the process since back in October. His exhaustive review and how-to article went live right at 6 PM and no doubt will be come the definitive resource on the subject in the detailing community. We also had three other reviews from our pro detailers that are now up for enthusiasts to read.

Mike did an amazing job coordinating the sales and promotion effort as he always does. He created the banner for the home page, the banner for the site, the coupon code for the promotion we’re running (3x Free Towels when you pre-order with us), wrote a blog post, sent out the newsletter, posted to Facebook, and created our sale page…all while not knowing much about the products until the last second.

And Greg quarterbacked the whole thing. He spent countless hours on the phone and over email confirming details about the products and the launch “rules”. He placed our order literally the second he learned that we could, hopefully putting us towards the top of the list. We saw, as Oke referred to him after visiting, the pitbull come out in full force He coordinated all of his efforts with Mike, Todd, Charlie, and I to ensure that we were all on the same page come 6 PM tonight. If he hadn’t pushed so hard, it’s likely that we would have missed the boat on this entire opportunity.

Time will only tell how successful these products are, and how integral our fast launch was to that success. We wanted to do everything we could within the rules to give ourselves every advantage possible, and I can confidently say that we did that. In the first few hours pre-orders have been pouring in, so my guess is that it was most definitely worth our effort. Of the sites I checked, we actually were the first ones offering the products. All indications from people like Todd, who know infinitely more about this stuff than I do, is that this system is a “game-changer” so it’s likely that once the early adopters start to report back on their results it will really start to pick up.

In addition to this product launch, we’re all still pushing forward really hard on all of our other projects. I suspect that the LockerPulse ad platform will be released in the next few days. The hard work that everyone has been putting in is ridiculously contagious. I tend to be pretty intrinsically motivated, but when you look up and see everyone else working their ass off you can’t help but get an extra kick of adrenaline. There’s no telling what this team can accomplish this year if things keep going like this.

All of that is even more impressive when you consider that in January we closed Tastefully Driven, stopped selling on Amazon, and stopped shipping internationally. Amazon in particular was a large portion of last year’s Holiday sales. This time around it was all domestic Detailed Image orders.

We were prepared for the spike in volume. We all went into the warehouse on Friday, Sunday, Monday, and today (Tuesday) to help pack orders. Unlike UPS, FedEx ships on Friday so we were able to get the first wave of orders out the door on Friday. A little after noon on Cyber Monday I was able to snap a few pictures of the orders for the weekend and Monday up until that point:

Most definitely our largest pile ever, although today was pretty close. Take a quick peek back at the photos in those posts from 2008 and 2009. It’s amazing to see how many more boxes we shipped out this year.

A lot of preparation goes into this six day stretch. It all starts in August when Mike begins to gather data about what we did last year, what trends are going on in retail, and puts together a tentative plan for us to use as a starting point. We meet in late August or early September and begin to do everything that’s necessary. We need to plan inventory and finances accordingly, which can be tricky because this time of the year is sandwiched by our four slowest months (September, October, January, and February).

On my end, the majority of my contribution comes in September and October when I’m programming in any new features that we’ll need. A few examples from this year were the mobile site, the free shipping upsell system, and a feature in our back-end that allows us to quickly edit an order to save precious customer service time (think of an AJAX invoice that lets you add products, remove products, change quantities, change prices, change shipping methods, change addresses, and more).

The actual days themselves were pretty anti-climactic for me this year. Mike has a ton of work executing the sales (newsletters, site banners, etc), Greg has a ton of work with customer service and inventory management, and George has extra customer service and accounting to do. For me though, this is the time where I see the fruits of my work, rather than scramble around like in years past. The site is really stable – I think I only received one technical question from a customer. Our processes are really refined and efficient. So, given my relative lack of pressing work, I did my best to help Charlie out in the warehouse in any way that I could. To be honest though, things went pretty smooth considering that we probably ripped through almost 40% of our inventory.

Contrast that with my posts from previous years where I was mentally and physically drained from the utter chaos. It’s a pretty awesome feeling to see everyone and everything come together like this. It gives me confidence that we can scale by several magnitudes without having to overhaul anything major. Which, on the DI side of things, frees us up to really focus on growth, and that really excites me.

That said, we still use free shipping as a promotional offer from time to time, and in particular during the Holiday season we do exactly what I just said we don’t normally do – offer free shipping to customers who spend over $150 in hopes of upselling all customers over the $150 during a season where people spend more freely. For us, the Holiday season starts on 11/1, and like last year we have the free shipping banner across the top of every page:

This year we also programmed in a new feature. On the Cart page – the page where you can delete items, change quantities, and get a shipping quote, just before you proceed to the Checkout page that requires a log in – users are now shown just how much more they need to spend to qualify for the free shipping. As they add/remove products on the page, the shipping estimate updates accordingly using AJAX:

I’ll plan on following up with a post on the results after the Holidays. To gauge success, I’ll look at average order value to see if that increased, and I’ll also look to see what percentage of our orders crossed the free shipping barrier.

The interesting thing about this is that this same system could be applied to other promotions that we run. Say, for example, when we give away free products. You could say “Spend $x more and get two free towels”. Really any promo that requires a min-spend could be potentially enhanced with the system. Will be interesting to see how well it works.