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Shakespeare Bookmarks

10/20/2005 3:44:32 PM

A while ago, on a whim, I tagged this quick Shakespeare bookmark along with a brochure print job I did for my employer. It was a fun little freebie that I had about 10,000 of. Then I got the crazy idea to send them to the Ashland, Oregon Shakepeare Festival gift shop to see if they'd want to sell them. Alas, I never heard from them again... for a while.

Three years and two jobs later I had just been let go as the .com I was working for gave up the ghost. Soon after that I got this letter out of the blue from Ashland saying they had a new purchasing person and wanted to order this bookmark and wanted to know if I had designs for 6 other plays they were planning. I was floored! But soon picked myself up and got to work creating the other designs and having them printed. Soon I had more bookmarks than I could have ever needed. I started contacting Shakepeare festivals around the country and had quite a few that bought some fairly nice quantities.

I still have many left over and I don't think I ever made back the cost of printing them (maybe just barely), but it was fun and I learned a lot. I think the biggest lesson that I learned is this: Marketing is Everything! You can have the greatest product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it may as well not exist. As long as I kept contacting people about my bookmarks, people kept buying. Once I stopped, they did too. Interesting.

Two more things:

1. FYI, if you ever have a domain name that you think you might want to keep, hang on to it. I let my westbookmarks.com domain expire and now some company in Kenya owns it and won't let me have it back. Bummer that I printed that domain on the back of all the bookmarks.
2. My bookmarks are still available at www.denniswest.com/bookmarks.