As a small family business, we don’t have a marketing or PR team. We’re balancing a lifestyle business with the hobbies and events of a full life. So when it comes to communicating with our customers, we try to keep it simple.
Since we started this business in 2009, communicating via the internet has become increasingly complex and expensive. Services haveenshittified, companies have merged into monopolies, social media feeds have been monetized entirely into “pay to play”, and AI has sloppified content and sowed distrust. Theorists have named these trends cumulatively, “dead internet theory.”
We won’t compromise on being ahuman-run company providing excellent customer service. But the number of social media channels and complexity of internet services is spreading us thin. We have to prioritize somewhere.
So here’s what you can expect from us:
You can always find our contact information on ourContact Page. We operate in the US Pacific time zone.
We aim to respond to all (non-spam) emails within 24 hours, although we do sometimes enjoy our weekends. Contact forms on our website go straight to the same email inbox.
Every once in a while a legitimate email gets caught in a spam filter. If you haven’t heard back from us, please try again using the website contact form or phone.
We set an out-of-office reply if we’ll be away from our computers for more than 48 hours.
Yes, we really do answer the phone! (We can’t tell you the number of times we have delighted our customers simply by being real humans and business owners who answer the phone.)
Sometimes we can’t, or don’t answer the phone right away: like if we’re taking a lunch break, or if the phone number is (erroneously) identified as Spam on our screen, or if it's outside of regular business hours.
In those cases, please leave us a voicemail and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
Although we have introduced a chat pop-up feature on our website,we don’t use bots or AI.
The chat shows up as an email in our regular inbox, and a push notification like a text message on our phones.
That’s why we set an auto-responder that shapes expectations on our typical working hours and response times (in the US Pacific time zone) when you send a chat message.
With their permission, we communicate with our customers and followers about:
Sales, discounts, and special offers
Announcements of new products and services
Product and service reviews and features
Business news and features (like “a day in the life” or our anniversary)
Hopefully-helpful original content that we write (like how-to’s, history lessons, and game instructions)
The first place we put new information is our blog. If you use an RSS reader, you cansubscribe to our RSS feed to be the first to know. The RSS link is under the Blog Navigation menu on each of our blog post pages.
Next, we send out monthly email newsletters and occasional feature emails. We love writing newsletters and take care to make them interesting and old-fashioned.
We consider email our most important communication method. It’s the one thing we all still have in common! That’s why we offer special discounts to our email subscribers.
We do our best to “segment” our emails to folks based on their interests. These are the emails we send:
Craft-written monthly newsletters to new and engaged subscribers with a potpourri of news and information
Occasional announcements for major sales and new products (like our popular annual “AS-IS / Dents & Dings Sale and Cyber Week Sales)
After-purchase follow-up emails with order and product information and one request for a review
Our customers prefer many different social media platforms. Trying to keep up with them all has spread us thin! We don’t use social media personally for recreation, so we’re not engaged on them as often.
We do share some announcements on most of the platforms we have accounts on but are not actively engaged users. The best way to contact us directly is via email, website, or phone.
We have accounts on:
No longer actively managed:
We don’t have a big advertising budget, nor the time to manage advertising campaigns. We do use automated Google Ads, which perform well and require minimum time through our Shopify partner.
We will also occasionally try to promote products on the SHOP and Etsy Marketplaces and boost posts on social media. We have data sharing for Meta (Facebook/Instagram) turned OFF.
Monthly newsletter and occasional announcements
*code will be in welcome email
Thank you!
