One of our key goals for 2022 was to merge the websites of Kraskin Baton and Baton Twirling Unlimited. After the two very hard years of 2020 and 2021, we knew we needed to make smart decisions in order to ensure the viability of our business. While 2020 and 2021 were full of business challenges, 2022 was full of personal challenges with my father being ill and passing away so many of our 2022 plans were delayed. Now, we are moving forward with many of the initiatives that we wanted to accomplish in 2022. Here's why we are combining our websites:
1. Managing an inventory with 2 websites, an Amazon store and email/phone orders pulling from it is challenging And, when we first bought Kraskin Baton, we had over 15 employees, as the pandemic wore on, we had to downsize and now have around 5 employees so we need to operate much more efficiently.
2. Managing the multiple communication challenges with minimal staff is challenging. Small business is no longer one phone number one email to manage, it's messages from Instagram, Facebook, email, phone calls, text messages and the websites. We have to streamline this so we can better manage and provide better service to our customers.
3. We need to increase our ability to send shipments faster. Producing orders or making batons needs to be able to happen faster with fewer people. Reducing the administrative time allows us to have our staff focused on making and shipping batons faster.
4. Expenses have gone up significantly in the last 2 years as you know and business expenses such as website platforms, website hosting, warehouse space have all increased. One of the things that customers value most about products is that they are affordable and while we have had small increases in our prices, we have been able to do this because we operate so efficiently. Reducing the website fees, hosting fees and all of the other expenses that come with a business will help us to keep our prices steady or with only a small increase relative to the market.
We're working to be the best that we can be and are looking forward to this next chapter. If you ever have questions about baton manufacturing or the industry, please contact us at batontwirlingunltd@gmail.com