Dear Friends,
Most of the leaf peepers come to Vermont too late to see the beautiful fall foliage at its peak. I was riding up in the beautiful part of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom and many areas are already at peak. It was a beautiful display of a quilt of colors with bright reds combined with various shades of green, brown and yellow. I look out the window in my bedroom and the maple tree outside is a color-wheel of hues ranging from bright red to neon pink.
The days this week are cool in the mornings with ground fog and sunny and warm in the afternoons. I drove my little Sprite in today and had to wear gloves but this afternoon, I’ll take the long way home. It is hard to believe that October starts next week and I do want to let all of our local customers know that all of Small Dog Electronics’ retail stores will be closed on Tuesday September 30th so that we can count inventory for the end of our fiscal year. Web and phone sales will remain open.
With October comes Domestic Violence Awareness month. Small Dog Electronics has been a part of Vermont’s “Safe at Work” program since its inception and through posters, resources, and HR policies we do our best to raise awareness and find resources to help our staff. Some time ago, we had an employee that was clearly a victim of domestic violence and as I reached out to find help I came up empty-handed. However, since my wife worked for Planned Parenthood at the time, I was able to find resources and develop a plan. Since then we have participated in working groups and feel this is an important area to be involved in and speak out about.
In October, we are launching a promotion in our retail stores to funnel donations to women’s shelters in each of the communities where we operate. With several participating brands we will make a donation for each sale to the local shelter. Why would we do this? Yes, we have an interest in combating domestic violence and want our employees to be safe at work or home but we have a commercial and philosophical reason, too. As you know, the margins on our products is very low, in many cases below 10% and you have a wide variety of places to buy these same products. It is difficult for us to compete with big box stores that use Apple products as “loss-leaders” by discounting or on-line resellers that do not charge sales tax. While many companies will simply suck it up and discount their products to compete, we have decided upon a different direction.
While we cannot compete solely on the basis of price, Small Dog Electronics wants to give you many reasons to choose to buy your next Mac or iPad from us. One way we can effectively compete is through community involvement. Instead of discounting the products we will make these donations to leverage our “money machine” to help the communities where we live. While we have our on-going customer-driven charitable contributions program where we match donations, we feel that the giving generated by these special promotions not only raises awareness about important issues but also lets our customers and our company make a real difference. I hope you agree!
This week’s Kibbles & Bytes special is a simple BOGO – buy one, get one on the Chill Pill portable speakers. This is the product that launched the Chill Pill Audio brand and is still the handiest portable speaker system!