EdSoehnel.com

On the Calendar

I will be at Naturally Boulder’s Spring Fling event this Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Posts

• Is it better to start with low prices and increase them later on, or start high and lower them?
• Update on spring house projects

Links

Consumer Products

• RT @haxlr8r: 24 hours left on the Pebble kickstarter funding – amazing the amount raised for this product: kickstarter.com/projects/59750…
• This looks like a nice tool for creating a more efficient marketplace of local food producers and buyers.: ow.ly/aXV3X
• RT @goodfoodmedia: Why are we fat? Blame the#farmbill, which made potato chips cheaper than apples.
• RT @RethinkRetail: P-O-P Vital as More Shoppers Decide in Store: Study | 76% of purchase decisions made in store chiefmarketer.com/promotional-ma……
• RT @retail_sails: For U.S. Consumers, Different Stores Mean Different Smartphone Shopping Behavior bit.ly/L3ELbZ #mobile #retail
• Why Successful Branding Still Happens Offline:ow.ly/aWa2p Great article
• RT @haxlr8r: How Kickstarter Is Saving Hardware Innovation mashable.com/2012/05/14/kic… via @mashable HAXLR8R does that a little too
• TV loyalty apps and second screen marketing.ow.ly/aW005
• The power of TV as an ad channel is still significant ow.ly/aUAai

Miscellaneous

• What if Your Life Could be More Engaging Than Television? ow.ly/b1uir Great friggin’ post by one of my favorite writers.
• Our extremely low snowpack in Colorado – 11% of normal statewide. Click link to see image:ow.ly/aXTdF

Recent picture with my lovely wife

Spring’s in full force around here.  Actually, its been like that since March, which was the driest we’ve had on record.  No snow or rain in that month that is typically one of the most precipitous.  We had a decent winter – 70 inches of snow – but overall, warm and dry the last few months.  I checked the latest statewide snow depth and we’re only 11% of average!  We could be in for a bad fire season around here. We live in the South Platte watershed, near the lower left area where it borders the Arkansas.

From 2012_05_18_House_Weather_Trees_Coop_Garden_Flowers

Our spring storms just pass on by, dropping rain that evaporates before it hits the ground.  They typically look like this:

From 2012_05_18_House_Weather_Trees_Coop_Garden_Flowers

Projects

There are a few main projects around here:  tree planting,  our chicken coop and our garden.  We eventually plan larger scale agriculture, but are starting small to figure out how to do it.

Tree Planting

The first thing we did this spring was get our potted evergreen tree seedlings into the ground.  We planted about 30 of them, with most going in along the south driveway and along the road.

From 2012_05_18_House_Weather_Trees_Coop_Garden_Flowers

Chicken Coop

The neighbor’s chickens that we were taking care of since December went back home last weekend.  We finished a bunch of repair work on the coop before they arrived last December, which included fixing the roof, doors, adding windows and gutters.  We will get it painted here in the next week in advance of chicks arriving (by mail) so we can have our own birds to raise.  Heres a photo of the coop in its present state – as you can see, it needs to be painted.

From 2012_05_18_House_Coop_Garden

We’ll have to build a small cage for the chicks, which will go inside the coop.  I’ve come across a few bull snakes in the coop and they would love to snack on a few chicks.  I am not sure how they get in, but they do.  They don’t mess with full grown chickens.

Garden

We are putting the garden in just east of the upper barn.  Its 1/10 of an acre – small, but plenty large enough for us to grow vegetables for us and perhaps to sell a few.

We had to start first by cleaning up the area, which had old planter boxes, fencing that was falling apart and some retaining wall work from old concrete pieces.

From 2012_05_18_House_Coop_Garden

From 2012_05_18_House_Coop_Garden

We are keeping these concrete pieces, as they will make good stepping stones for walkways that we intend to build.  I placed them right next to the upper barn in a little depressed area that is perfect for storing them.  There were a lot more of them than we thought and it took awhile to get them hauled over.

From 2012_05_18_House_Coop_Garden

Once we got the area cleaned up, we put in fence posts and support beams.  We managed to used left over wood from the piles around here to complete this.

From 2012_05_18_House_Weather_Trees_Coop_Garden_Flowers

Here’s a picture of one of the wood piles that we are sorting through to obtain decent slats to complete the fence.  Romeo helps out by watching for any bunnies that might come out of the wood pile so he can chase them.

From 2012_05_18_House_Weather_Trees_Coop_Garden_Flowers

We started the fence 6 weeks ago and still have a ways to go before its finished. Its taking longer than we want and we’re not sure we will be able to do much for planting this year. Even when the fence is completed, we will have to till the ground and smooth it out. Right now, its a mess with digging out the old planter boxes and irrigation lines.

This was a question posted to Quora that I answered, which I have re-copied below:

I know consumer products, so can only answer from that perspective:

1. Do your research against competitors and the category to find the price range. If you plan to go to retail, you do in-store research and your online price is then dependent on your retail price. If you will sell online, research your competitors and category as you would for retail, but you might find a much wider price range.
2. Research the product size/unit count. There is generally an optimal size that allows for sufficient shelf turnover/product movement and maximizes your revenue. You do that by looking at what is on-shelf already.  If your product size is too large, then consumers may not need to purchases as often, leading to slow shelf movement and possibly product spoilage.
3. If your product benefits/features are considered to offer premium value to the consumer, then you might lead with a higher price for the category.  If not, then you might have a lower price for the category.
4. Always try to price higher, because it’s a lot easier to come down in price. Also, you will need every margin point you can squeeze out of your product, especially if you are a start-up or small consumer product company. Without the benefits of leveraging your fixed costs and your COGS over a larger volume of products produced, you will barely eek out a profit, if that. Additionally, price higher so that you can cover yourself from having to make any price increases for the next few years, if possible. That way, you have more breathing room to absorb raw material price hikes, instead of passing along to consumers, which would likely affect sales.
5. If you are selling online only, then you have wider latitude to test your price. This week’s buyer is probably different from next week’s buyer, so you have less to worry about in distorting your brand (unless you are already an established consumer brand). In this case, test to get your optimal price/volume that you want, and re-test occasionally. I tested a product once from a low of $20 to a high of $80, while also altering the benefits/value/quantity that I communicated to the end buyer, just to see which set worked the best. Or, if you have direct marketing resources, either because you have a list of past customers or you have purchased a list of prospects, you can test with much less brand distortion effects.

Additional answers were provided by others, here.

Posts

• Why its good to keep getting punched
• Chicken fat and death

Links

Consumer Products

• TV remains the top advertising choice for 54% of advertisers (highest proportion since 2009)j.mp/IPxR8s
• RT @brandchannelhub: Walmart Announces Crowdsourced New Product Winners:bit.ly/KRIAgv Disappointing that they only selected 3.
• RT @retail_sails: Brazil retailer using Facebook likes… on its clothing hangers bit.ly/Lw4GImGreat idea!
• RT @retail_sails: Costco makes plans to significantly expand its #online business bit.ly/ISbaP1 #retail $COST; and, discussion around Costco’s online push: ow.ly/aLZjN
• There’s More to Oreo Than Black and White ow.ly/aLWbo
• Really nice summary here retail and good takeaways for consumer product companies. ow.ly/aLZZ0 from@instoretrends
• Insightful article about the power of traditional TV to sell products. ow.ly/aMkxv
• Geofencing in its infancy, but I think it has potential to help retail stores with creating a customer experience: ow.ly/aNNys
• A Study on Brand Loyalty: What We Can Learn From Trader Joe’s: ow.ly/aNO9N
• How To Convince A Retailer To Look Past Margin ow.ly/aPYLZ
• Amazon Add-Ons: ow.ly/aQ1gs More innovation from Amazon, via @keith_rng
• Private Label Brands: The Future Leaders Of Retail? ow.ly/aSd69
• May trend report examines 10 Ways Marketers Are Using the Second Screen ow.ly/aSdPx Nice examples in this report.
• Ikea and Apple – powerhouse retailers: ow.ly/aSE9R Great article.

Miscellaneous 

• Great article summarizing what a VC really cares about (or should) by @bfeld: ow.ly/aKvxu Warning: foul language alert
• Buffet to buy newspapers: ow.ly/aKFVf Signif. of this is that this biz may have hit bottom – Buffet is a value guy

Other Posts Across the Net

• Kraft is doing a great job of “Glocalization”Kraft is doing a great job of “Glocalization” - LinkedIn Group comment thread
• Ikea’s dominance

My wife’s first book has published!

This post ultimately provides some info about the primal diet and cholesterol.  I am on the primal diet due to serious health issues that I went through.  Paleo is another name for the diet, and I think it’s the more popular name given for the diet, but I happen to like primal better.

Fresh chickens out of the oven, with the skin already consumed. Have I grossed you out, yet?

It has been a year since I went on the diet and my recovery has been awesome.  Things still aren’t perfect, and I continue to work on some nagging issues, but they are minor.  I am currently working on a series of posts that chronicle the health issues I had, my experience with doctors and drugs and my experience with the diet after a year.  I hope to have that out in the next month.

I basically eat meat and vegetables, with a few nuts and a little fruit mixed in.  My diet is predominantly organic, with free range/grass feed/wild caught meats and eggs.  I eat lots of meat.

Since I can’t have the really tasty foods, like cinnamon roles, donuts, ice cream, milk chocolate – basically all of the stuff that it appears we as humans should not be eating anyway – I delight in more simple pleasures, like fat.

Yes, I love meat fat.  My favorite ritual is to eat the cooked skin off a fresh chicken coming out of the oven, or to pound down a full 8 ounces of bacon, and save the grease for cooking in other meals.

Heart attack candidate, you think?  Well, something will eventually kill this body, and your’s, too!  but I can tell you this: the primal diet and my indulgence in fat won’t kill me as quickly as all those other foods that the government, doctors and pretty much most everyone else says are good for you – whole grains, beans and legumes.   Those buggers are poison to me and so is dairy.

A typical meal - meat and a ton of vegetables. The bowl has a few berries

So you’re probably wondering how bad my cholesterol is.  Or, bad relative to the current way that doctors and labs seem to interpret it.  Yes, without a doubt, I am a red flag. And, I need to get on an immediate IV solution of Lipitor, or whatever the latest drug of choice that the pharma companies are pushing.

However, if you consider my cholestrol levels using a different method (links to one of my favorite primal content websites), I am as healthy as a horse. And in fact, when I run my cholesterol levels through this method from tests done 3 years ago, I have a few toes in the grave. That cholesterol test was included in my annual physical and my doctor gave me an A+ for health.

I don’t go to that doctor anymore.