One Year Anniversary of Mind Flight
About one year ago Mind Flight soft launched as an idea to both learn how eCommerce works and make my own salves and balms for personal use and to share with friends.
After finding Shopify the business part of Mind Flight launched. As orders started coming in, over 200 people became customers, and over 3,000 units of product made. Many of those 3,000 units were given out to friends as tester kits to hone in on the right consistency.
There is still lots to learn, but feedback on the Mind Flight formulas continues to be positive. However, change to improve will keep going on.
Our most popular product, Lavender Fields now has more essential lavender and tea tree oils and a more robust aroma.
Many customers wanted the power of arnica and comfrey root in our peppermint / menthol product Polar Breeze. Turns out they were mixing Volcanic Ash with Polar Breeze to get the desired effect but had to buy two products. Now we have a more perfect Polar Breeze and have sunset Volcanic Ash, which was not as popular as our other three formulas.
For a while we were making 1 Oz plastic tubs, 2 Oz plastic tubs, .15 Oz lip balms, plus our most popular 2 Oz tins and .5 Oz large tubes. The tins and large tubes will be the only containers remaining. This will make production in small quarters move much faster. Of all things label making proved to be incredibly time consuming. Especially, since every time I’d look at the labels, there was another item I was changing. That meant a new design and then a re-print of all labels I just printed.
Also, for a few months you may have seen hand sanitizer being sold under the names Tidal Wave and Tidal Mist. That was a great revenue stream and each batch would sell out in 48 hours or less. But, that stuff is pretty flammable and storing 10 gallons at a time on the 23rd floor of an apartment building was probably not that smart. So, no more hand sanitizer. We should all stick with Purell now that there is no supply shortage and CVS is overflowing with it.
Also, production time to make a batch of 150 tins and tubs is down to 4 hours (including clean up) vs. 6+ hours. Since I do not have a garden or a garage for hobbies, I have a kitchen that is rarely used and a laptop. So, plenty of time on Saturday's to make products and update the http://mindflight.co/ site.
Now that the site has been cleaned up a bit, new pictures added, and the three formulas people love are better than before, it was time for a blog post and Instagram update.
Also, every product now has a bar code and one day I’ll finally figure out selling on Amazon. Never would I have thought sales and marketing would be the most challenging part of this effort, but that is the biggest learning curve right now.
Most importantly, thank you to each and every one of you who has bought products, tested products, given feedback and helped me make the most of this hobby. Hope you are still enjoying Mind Flight too! And if you have run out, time to buy more :-) https://mindflight.co/collections/all