It appears that my last blog was in September of 2019. Not quite up to my goal of "once weekly." Luckily lots of things have happened in the interim which might make playing a bit of catch up easier. I probably won't even announce this one. I'll look bad. I'll pad the stats a bit first so I can create the illusion of a dedicated writer.
We're moving strongly into month two of social distancing right now. It is a very weird moment in time for a lot of people. I have to admit a lot of the fundamentals about my life have not changed a whole lot. One of the perks of being self employed. The big thing that came about because of the COVID-19 mess was our hand soap and I have to admit some philosophical difficulties associated with its origins. Early on there were a lot of unscrupulous, selfish individuals out there. They bought up masks and hand sanitizer with the intention of drastically inflating the price once people became desperate. Luckily these actions were universally interpreted as despicable, not to mention illegal. The situation did make me realize however that in a lot of ways I was remarkably similar, without the intent. I was sitting on gallons and gallons of base product that I was turning into high end shampoo and other products but could just as easily become something more useful. Thus the hand soap was born. Fast forward a couple months and it turns out that (at least as of this date) many of the predicted shortages were, fortunately, hyperbolic. Interestingly this has led to another personal moral dilemma. There seems to me to be something unsavory about trading on peoples fears. I have a hand soap I would like to sell, because I'm a business owner and thats how you make money, but it seems like the most efficient way to sell it would be to advertise its "anti corona" properties. As I think of that route every tag line I create leaves a bad taste in my mouth that I can't quite explain. There is nothing inherently false anywhere it just feels odd to piggy back on well founded concerns for personal financial gain. I don't say this to be a martyr or pretend that I'm some paragon of virtue. In fact I'm not even sure such concerns are well founded. My largest take away and biggest fear is mostly that my timorous approach to marketing does not a successful entrepreneur make. A perspective supported when the only tag lines I feel comfortable with sound like, "tea tree & kelp hand soap, it will clean your hands" a statement I almost died of boredom writing; which leads me to believe it might struggle turning heads in the proverbial marketing wild.
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AuthorWill Drury, founder of Maine Magic Mud. Archives
February 2021
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