The Recipe for Success.
Seeing that I had the perfect recipe for online success, I decided to take a few days off to reflect on what we had done. Janet was ecstatic, we had been paid, everything was just going right and then it hit me! I didn’t have the perfect recipe, Janet had it! Let me explain; you see, Janet was doing everything absolutely to the book, she had a successful offline marketing strategy and a comprehensive and very targeted strategy online. She didn’t just want to sell online, she had established her “bread and butter” business offline and her strategy to go online was just basically the “gravy” to her business. The combination of both increased her overall business by 70%, with 50% attributed to out of state sales.

Dot com ... Boom or Bust?
We are all too familiar with the dot com boom. Literally thousands of people, with a decent idea became millionaires overnight, at least on paper. During this time, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the Internet to try to get “a piece of the action”. Marketing companies turned to the Internet, introducing hundreds of marketing strategies, some with great success. Overnight, the demand for online marketing grew to levels never seen. They literally asked for sizeable costs, to get your brand out to the user community. With this, offline marketing companies started seeing dramatic decreases in advertising revenues. Companies who engaged in traditional offline marketing, like marketing in the yellow pages, started shifting their marketing dollars to the net, businesses wanted their names out there and they were willing to adopt the Internet at another medium. The result was an increase to offline marketing costs which turned even more people to marketing on the net. In March 2001, the dot com economy came crashing down. It was ugly, really ugly, but there were survivors. Businesses like Janet’s, who had previously established her offline business and whom were looking at the net as simply a way to enhance their business. But the most amazing thing about Janet’s story is that as things were crashing down all over the net, she was actually expanding her market reach, simply because she didn’t rely solely on the net. You see; those companies who did disappeared, created additional revenue opportunities for Janet. The moral of this story is that you need a very good marketing mix and a solid "brick and mortar" foundation to grow your business online and offline.

Helping Create a Sense of Community Within the leather Industry.
Since 1995, we have literally visited thousands of online leather industry sites, engaged in leather industry discussion forums and mailings lists. One thing that became very apparent was the little sense of community in which the leather industry was functioning in. During the last few years, we have seen a steady growth towards a united online leather community but there is still much work in this area. The fact of the matter is that if we all strive to create a sense of community, everyone is going to win. Organizations that are around purely for profit and do not care about their customers or the industry will quickly be found by users. The end result will be a stronger leather industry, satisfied customers and an increase in revenues for all.