The smell of wood, rubber and whiskey.

Keat Teoh
Keat Teoh
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

Lessons learnt from an Irish eccentric and my crash course in business 101.

In the beginning of summer of 2015, after working four years at Casey Rubber Stamps, I decided to leave my job as shop manager and start my own rubber stamp company. John Casey, the founder and sole proprietor of the business, is a master at rubber stamp manufacturing. He specializes in producing stamps of victorian era imagery, as well as customizing stamps from designs provided by the client. An Irishman who immigrated to the States in the early 60s, John is a shrewd businessman. But his business model and practices are a bit dated for the 21st century.

“He was the Mr. Miyagi to my Karate Kid.”

As the only employee in the tiny 200 square feet shop, I worked on everything John was working on. He was the Mr. Miyagi to my Karate Kid. Day to day tasks included cutting and molding wooden handles, creating photopolymer plates, vulcanizing rubber sheets, dealing with walk-in customers, and answering the phone and emails. Within a year of working with John for 8 hours daily, I was able manage the shop, even in his absence while he takes his occasional ‘sabbatical’ to the local watering hole. (in his words.)

Besides being a stamp master, John was also a bona fide luddite. Excluding the iMac (which I convinced him to upgrade from a Dell PC running on Windows Vista) and his eight year old flip phone, the shop was run like a pre-electronics era business. Even the cash register was unplugged and only served as a drawer for cash. However, being a niche trade and located in the heart of post-gentrified East Village, business was good. Plenty of sales were made despite the fact that customers had to walk down the street to find an ATM to pay for their purchases.

My days at Casey Rubber Stamps. Photo cred: Josh Cohen (fieldday-usa.com)

Over the course of my apprenticeship, I started seeing all kinds of problems with his business model and workflow. Due to the niche quality of the trade and popularity of his shop (especially among Japanese tourists), the shop would constantly be overwhelmed with emails and phone calls. In addition to this problem, the shop’s production workflow tends to bottleneck in various stages of the manufacturing process (due to various internal and external circumstances). Only accepting cash and money orders also hindered the flow of the business; customers delayed the transaction because they had to leave the shop to go find an ATM, and occasionally orders would get abandoned altogether. I tried to implement solutions but John is a hardheaded individual who is reluctant of changes to his old school ways.

After years of nagging and arguing, I finally took my knowledge of the rubber stamp business and freed myself from John’s imposing business barriers to start Beast Quality Rubber Stamps. Due to the high cost of commercial lease in NYC, I could only afford to set up shop in my two bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Without a storefront, I researched and compared different e-commerce platforms, and decided that Etsy would be most suitable for BQ’s handmade products. With a low overhead cost and a built-in community of users, I assumed the platform that marketed handmade items would work well as an entry level business model.

I was running a company full time, and getting paid less than an intern.

Through Etsy, I found out that there were a lot more to selling stamps than just placing the product on a display shelf. While I was working at Casey’s, the stamps practically sold themselves. With an e-commerce platform, I had to learn a slew of skills; how to write copy, shoot a product, promote with ads on social media, and optimizing search terms. I also learnt that rubber stamps, as a handmade product, was not so niche on the internet.

Some stamps that I’ve designed for Beast Quality

For about a year and a half, I managed to keep the business afloat, with only a small profit margin. There were spikes in sales around the holiday season, and with the occasional discount coupon codes. But with all the hats I was wearing: sales, shipping, R&D, graphic design, manufacturing, marketing and social media; I was running a company full time, and getting paid less than an intern. From these accumulative experiences, I was able to look back at my choices, and realize that the foundation of the business model was flawed, because it was based on a lot of assumptions that I’ve gathered from my prior experience working for John. Throughout my time running Beast Quality, I learnt about the market, my competition, and the rubber stamp user base. After reviewing my business model against the data, there were no clear or immediate solutions.

The main reason Beast Quality was having trouble making money was due to the business model of trying to make everyone a customer. At Casey’s, everyone came to the one place for stamps because it was the only place anyone in New York City knew of to recommend. And with the recommendation comes the story of the eccentric Irishman in his tiny East Village workshop, which in itself is pure marketing gold. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of recommendation available. And this drove a lot of customized orders to his shop. This was was my business lacked, a steady stream of high cost orders that would only be viable & profitable if there were a minimum of 10–20 custom orders a week. With Etsy, overhead costs are low, but without a steady stream of custom jobs, just making and selling your own stock is not ideal.

Also, without research or a targeted demographic, creating rubber stamp designs based on my own personal taste is akin to trying to catch fish in the middle of the ocean with only a fishing rod. It’s a lot of work for little to no return. I was naive enough to believe that by merely showing people the many things one can do with rubber stamps was enough to motivate them to desire one. I thought that by promoting to stamp users to be creative with what they can do with the product is a flawed plan full of frictions for the user. I was not addressing a need or motivation that the customer had. I took on any custom jobs from anyone who needed a stamp, and since my turnaround time was not as quick as my competition, I thought that charging the bare minimum was going to help business. Alas I was only creating more work for myself and getting paid less for it. I was spread too thin, and it was not worth the time spent.

In the end, I decided that I would cut my losses and close up shop. For now. BQ’s business model was a failure, but from failure there’s plenty to learn. With some time and a healthy dose of user experience knowledge, I know I will revisit this path again, and do better.

Keat Teoh

Written by

Keat Teoh

UX designer for GreenSlate. Founder of Beast Quality Stamps.

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