Dear Friends,
Well, I was hoping to go to the local snack bar for lunch before our radio show yesterday, but it looks like we are in for some rain. The apple tree outside my window here at the office is in full bloom. My house is a bit higher in elevation, so my trees are budding, but not yet in bloom. I did get to do some work in my garden this past week, rototilling and planting peas, carrots, beets, spinach and lettuce. If the rain is not too persistent, I should be able to get a lot more planted this weekend.
Every now and then we get customers who ask about the “small dogs with every order,” so I thought I would share the story about how that came about. When I first started the company almost 20 years ago, I wanted to differentiate the company so I started including some “prizes in each box.” I went to one of my favorite companies, Archie McPhee, in Seattle and bought various items including small plastic dogs, rubber brains, slime dogs and other items. As I shipped out gear, I would put something in each box. Bigger orders got rubber brains, but every order got little dogs.
I had to drop the rubber brains when a customer called to tell me that the rubber brain had melted all over her expensive Apple display but the dogs survived. Eventually, as we grew, my need for more dogs outstripped my supply, so in one of my first ventures into international commerce, I located a Chinese supplier for dogs and bought them in bulk. My daughter and Artie’s daughter (the season-sisters Autumn & Winter) would come by the office after school to bag dogs. We would put a couple dogs in baggy with a business card and ship it off with each order.
As our online commerce grew, we wanted to give customers lots of reasons to buy from us, and in addition to not charging credit cards before items were shipped, etc, we added “free small dogs with every order.”
Our need for dogs grew, and the daughters were getting overwhelmed by our bagging needs, so the next time I ordered, we not only had the manufacturer include business cards with our dogs’ names on them (people still call asking for the dogs on the cards), but we also had them make a mold to produce dogs that matched our pets. A couple of years ago, we also hosted a contest where two winners would have their dogs immortalized in Small Doggy molds; it was a lot of fun to pick winners from loyal customers!
I have a goal to one day buy 1 million dogs, but have only gotten 25% of the way there so far.
Do you have a collection of our small dogs? Send me a picture of your collection and my team of expert judges and jesters will pick the best three and you will receive a special gift from Small Dog and we will post the pictures, too. Just send them to me: don@smalldog.com.
My special this week comes with double dogs, assuming Artie remembers to toss them in. I have noticed Emily wearing wrist braces lately and that reminds me of my struggles early on in Small Dog’s history with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. It was so bad that I ended up having surgery on both wrists. I have used an ergonomic keyboard every since and have written extensive reviews of a number of keyboards.
My hands-down (pun intended) favorite and my keyboard for the past 15 years is the Kinesis The Advantage Keyboard. This is a keyboard that has a couple of advantages beyond being the best ergonomic keyboard. One, the keys are all programmable, but more importantly, the keyboard has a learning curve so that no one ever touches my keyboard.
To be honest, for the first week of using the keyboard, my typing speed suffered, but by week two, I had recovered my normal speed and shortly thereafter I know my speed improved. I give this keyboard my two thumbs up! While it is more expensive than the run-of-the-mill keyboards, your wrists will thank you.
This week, you’ll get $20 off of the Kinesis The Advantage Keyboard at $249.99. Give us a bit of extra time to fill your order, though, because these are purchased to order rather than stocked.