Ecommerce is now the talk of the town.  It has simply changed the whole way business is done.  It does not matter if you are selling on it or purchasing now from it, this has flat out changed.  Because of this, this year I learned a lot of different things.  I do believe that is a good thing for most people to increase their knowledge base consistently.  For myself, the company I work for ended up changing some of its business practices.  It was not the best change for some but we started to move our marketing for our company completely in-house.  This means that all of our online and manual mailing marketing was going to be put together at our office instead of ordering it out for others to accomplish.  This takes a lot of logistics and a lot of planning to actually make this happen and to do it under budget.  What this also did was mean in order to cut costs our current staff was going to take extra time to put it all together.  This was a huge switch because even our boss was packing cardboard boxes with gifts and sending them off to our partners.  It was pretty cool to see everyone take the same amount of time off to put these together but it was a process to learn how to keep the costs low.  It is nice when everyone pitches in.

Now, this all had to start somewhere and the beginning steps of this were to look at what projects we had done in the past and learn to buy the products we would need to put our own marketing together.  In all honesty, the online section was the most simply because it entailed simply writing copy and putting ads up across different social media platforms.  But the complicated steps were the direct mailing pieces and corporate gifting we do.  I ended up spending a lot of time on other people’s websites and major packaging companies’ websites to see what we could do. This was hard because there really are many steps to each one of these projects.  

We really didn’t think that the fact was aa corporate gift had to first be built from the ground up.  This means getting back to the basics because it starts with purchasing the cardboard boxes for each of the gifts.  Then we had to find the right size, shape, and color for each one.  Then it even got more complicated because we had to find the correct type of tape that looked good on them.  Then we had to choose colors or stickers for designs.  The look of these projects was complicated.  What seems like a simple task actually turns into a really complicated project due to the fact that it has to look congruent with our brand or their brand.  Then we had to fill the gifts with the correct filling.  

It turns out there is paper filling.  It can come in lots of sizes and different colors.  So we had to brand each one of these colors correctly and then find a consistency of the filling in order for it to look good and not be annoying.  There were a lot of variables but we ended up succeeding and saving a bunch of money in the process.