One of my New Year’s resolutions is to do a better job marketing our products. Five and a half years ago I was much more aggressive about sending out brochures and postcards regularly. Of course, back then we weren’t really making any sales so I had plenty of time on my hands to focus on marketing. Those efforts slowed to a trickle as production demands grew. Last year we sent out a single mailing in January and then nothing else. I think it’s dangerous to get complacent about growing our customer base.

As an experiment, we are going to send out a direct mailing once a month for the entire year and track the resulting interest and sales to determine how much our marketing efforts are worth. To liven up the experience, we’re rolling out 3 promotions during the course of the year that will be announced on postcards and on our site. So get ready, it’s going to be a fun year!

A couple months back I had the pleasure of visiting one of the schools that is using our motion control gear. Like many schools, they use our system as just one example in a pile of automation systems. Since I fancy myself a technophile first, and businessman second, I think it is an excellent idea to have multiple flavors of automation systems available to students to learn the differences and similarities of a wide variety of systems. The philosophy behind our products is to keep the costs low and the interface simple, but this comes at the expense of some advanced features and therefore our stuff lacks some of the really cool tricks of higher end systems. Higher end systems from the big boys eschew cost in the quest to bring complicated effects to big shows.
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We’ve been given a bunch of USITT Stage Expo passes for the upcoming conference in Cincinnati.  If you (or someone you know) would benefit from a free Expo pass, drop me a line (gareth at creative conners dot com) and I’ll send you an invitation.

It was a banner day last week when we shipped our 1000th piece of gear.  Yep, serial number 1000 rolled out the door attached to a lovely new Stagehand.  I leaned over and said, “Ian, ring the bell, we just solid our one-thousandth product!”

He unenthusiastically replied, “We don’t have a bell.”

Oh well, I was impressed.

Alright, so this is hopefully a shorter blog entry (it’s not any shorter, I checked).  While I’ve got some interesting new topics/thoughts on some of our automation products, those thoughts need a little more time to simmer and some pictures and diagrams that I’m too lazy to tackle tonight.  Instead, I want to get a few things off my chest about another Creative Conners, Inc. project that isn’t tied to theatrical automation.   Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but the new Creative Conners web site is finally finished and running on a new web-host.  The old site served us well for the past 4-1/2 years, but it was becoming a little dated and difficult to maintain & update.  The new site tries to be a little more streamlined and easier to navigate.  Behind the scenes the new site is much easier to update which will hopefully encourage us to keep the pages up to date and add new products to the site more quickly.  

Visually, the biggest goal for me was to get more actual photos up on the site.  The old site used a lot of stylized line drawings of our products, which was arguably a legitimate artistic style, but I yearned for more photos.  When I’m shopping around on line I want to  see pictures of the real thing.  Especially if the product is being made by a small company, I want to KNOW that they are actually producing the widget not just selling a design that hasn’t been physically realized yet.  Since we are a small, small company making somewhat expensive specialized gear, I felt it was important to show first-time customers that our products are really being made and used throughout the theatres of all shapes and sizes.

The latest addition to the new site is this blog.  I have no idea how many people will bother to read this, but I like the idea of giving a sneak peek into the company in a casual setting.  I intend to take the salesman hat off when writing on this blog and discuss some of the nitty-gritty details of scenic automation, programming, and general technology that interest me.  With any luck, it will interest 1 or 2 other people