Kill your darlings

Stop spending time and money on things that aren't selling, even if you love them

Welcome. I’m Katherine Raz. I own a shop in Tacoma, Washington called The Fernseed and this is my newsletter about running an independent retail business in the age of Amazon, Covid, etc. If you’re a shop owner, or you sell products to small retail businesses, or you’re just curious what this whole business is about, you’re in the right place. (And if this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive it yourself right here. It’s free!)

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“Kill your darlings” is a writers’ principle, the idea that if one of your beloved characters’ storylines doesn’t serve your plot, you have to murder them. Not “murder,” as in “write their murder into your story.” “Murder” meaning, “delete all the pages in which they appear,” even if you’ve spent months writing them.

I love borrowing phrases like this from other creative disciplines, because I get to fall back comfortably on the knowledge that, while this stuff is hard, I’m walking a well-worn path. Nobody wants to spend time or money on something that ultimately gets thrown into the waste bin, but we have to sometimes. So often, in fact, that there’s a phrase for it. You’re not special, everyone makes these mistakes. The real mistake is not to kill your darlings once you’ve realized they’ve got to go.

Retail businesses definitely have darlings. All businesses do! Our darlings aren’t characters, but products (or projects) we’ve invested in that aren’t selling.

I’ve talked before on this blog about the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, the theory that 80% of your results come from 20% of your input. This is certainly true in my shop. Most of our revenue comes from just a handful of products, and I know what those products are. Now, does that mean the other 80% of our products (those that aren’t driving 80% of sales) are duds? No. They still serve a purpose. They’re window dressing, icing on the cake — they’re products that make up the character of the store even if they sit on the shelves a bit longer.

But don’t get me wrong here. It’s not like I’m making 80% of my revenue from 20% of my products and the other 80% are all icing. There are some darlings in there, some precious, perfect little pet projects and favorite products of mine that I put time and focus and energy and money—oh god so much money—into that are not only not selling, they’re costing me money to keep them around.

Let me give you an example.

When we shut down for Covid in the spring of 2020, we pivoted pretty hard into products our customers would embrace during lockdown. One of those products was plant-along-at-home kits. It was Amelia’s idea, and it was genius. We’d sell a plant, a pot, a potting scoop, and some dirt, and package it in a cute box. Then Amelia hosted Instagram Live streams where anyone with the kit could follow along and ask questions while potting their plant. It was so incredibly popular I couldn’t even believe it.

But it always bothered me that it wasn’t perfect enough. The box was just a shipping box we stuck some Fernseed branded tape on. In order to direct people to the live streams, we printed Avery labels with the next live dates printed on them. Amelia’s live streams were amazing, but she was just hosting them in a camper parked in her backyard using her phone, so the video quality wasn’t amazing. It was all super amateur hour in my book and ripe for a re-brand.

Let’s interject for a moment here. After three years in business (and a lifetime of living with myself) I now know this amateur-hour-but-what-if-we-did-super-perfect-branding-instead territory is a warning light signaling I’m about to spend a bunch of time and energy—and money, good god so much money—on something that is probably just fine as it is. I say I embrace the ethos of “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” but in reality, I’m spending a few hours browsing Packola while considering what branding agency I could hire to skyrocket us out of the “so DIY it hurts” category into “we just sold 40,000 of these via Instagram ads and now I’m going on Shark Tank” land. In other words, I need to watch my shit when it comes to wanting to work on a branding and packaging project for no good reason.

So back to the plant-along-at-home kits. Once we’d “proven the concept” with them, I gave myself the green light to (buckle up here, folks):

• hire a professional videographer to produce new videos for the most popular kits

• pay for a Vimeo pro subscription to host the videos

• hire a graphic designer to design custom packaging for each kit

• hire a product photographer to take professional photos of each kit

• hire an Instagram marketing agency to create ads so we could sell them to a wider audience

In addition, I allowed the anticipation of how busy we would be shipping these kits to dictate staffing decisions. I figured we’d need a full-time back-end inventory and shipping manager just to process kits. Granted, this person already worked for us—I didn’t hire them specifically for the job—but I defended the idea that they would never have to work a retail shift because we needed full-time warehouse staff to process kit orders.

The professional plant-along-at-home kit video, featuring Amelia and my son.

Now, I didn’t put numbers to the hiring figures above, but quick napkin math tells me I probably spent around $8,000 on production and branding for these kits, and the time I spent prepping them pushed our timeline for re-launching them into the fall of 2020. You know what happened in the fall of 2020? Everyone was on Zoom meetings, including our kids, who were attending school remotely. What used to be fun and cute (doing a plant project via video!) was now tiresome. The initial enthusiasm for our kits had worn off.

After all that time and energy and money put into the initial kit project, do you know how many total plant-along kits we sold after the relaunch?

Six.

At least I saved myself the agony of actually getting the custom boxes printed for them! And we hadn’t actually stocked up on too many kit-specific supplies that we couldn’t sell in the shop otherwise, although we did finally sell the last of the hanging globe terrariums in our anniversary sale last week.

The hardest part about killing this darling was that my 6-year-old son took part in the tutorial video with Amelia. It is seriously so cute. (You can watch it here, and you should, to make me feel better.)

But the reality is that killing this darling frees up my time and energy (and money, so much money) to focus on the things that are selling, so I can figure out how to do those things better. I’m going to talk a bit about how I’m approaching that in the coming weeks—it’s a fun process, and way more rewarding than realizing you’ve sunk eight grand into a product that sold six units. (One of them was to my mom, did I tell you that?)

Meanwhile I’d love to know: do you have darlings you need to kill? They’re not limited to retail businesses, either—every business has them. What are yours, past or present?

Believe me, I know. They’re so, so painful to let go of. But killing them really does help you move the story forward.

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Bonus content this week! Remember when I mentioned I was going to start writing for the Aeolidia blog? My first Q&A post is live today. I’m answering a question about how to decide what merchandise to stock in a shop that mostly sells your own products, as well as how to drive foot traffic to out-of-the-way locations with sporadic open hours. You can read it here.