How many of us get through a project without musing over what an optimist Thomas Edison was.  His statement that invention was 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration was likely meant to be an overestimation of how much elbow grease went into the actual realization of an idea.  Sometimes it is more like 0.5% and 99.5%. 

So it is with a new program like IF Retail Management.  It is out now and there are people using it and implementing it and some of us are breathing that sigh of accomplishment like we think we are finished.   

Not so fast.  Several of us have been keeping notes all along about how to set it up and what all the options are when you are working with it.  Good thing.  People are asking questions and in addition to great folks on the phones, there are some articles appearing on the website to help you. 

The first two are Pricing Moulding and Making a Sale.  You will find exactly how to work through all of the options.  Soon to come is another article all about markup tables.  On the docket are articles about pricing mats, mounting, glass, and labor items.  There will be exposes on the Tickets and Orders Screen and the Status Screen.  

These articles take a different approach than the manual.  Where the manual shows each button in turn and tells you what it does, these articles deal with a single subject and tell about all the related functions you’ll need to understand in order to set up and run that aspect of IF Retail Management like your store works. 

This work is just beginning.  We look forward to your comments and your requests regarding what you’d like to see next. 

For the last week we have been celebrating the first phase toward releasing IF Retail Management.  Each of us working on it has had their own special sphere if interest.  While others focused on silly things like user interfaces, mine has been pricing.  Our mantra as we were building this has been “Cost Based Pricing.” 

Sure we want to have flexibility so that every shop can price mats and mounting the way they want, but we wanted to make sure that a shop could base their prices on actual material costs as supplied by the vendors.  They would choose their markups and add labor charges to come up with more scientific prices than they have had before.  Then, when the vendors raise their foamboard prices, every item involving foamboard increases accordingly.

So far, so good?  That is, until one customer in our testing group had higher than average prices for fabric mats.  At the time, the prices didn’t fit our formula too well.  On a positive note, the customer had sales figures to support the effectiveness of the higher prices. So we changed a few things to accommodate this and the pricing options are more flexible now.  We want to make sure our pricing tools help framers be more profitable.

This incident brought to mind an article about 15 years ago in the Wall Street Journal by Peter Drucker.  It was called The Five Deadly Business Sins and one of them was cost based pricing, our mantra, if you remember.  Recalling it made me swallow hard, but his point was that the market sets prices for everything and the rationale is either “what the traffic will bear” or “price based costing” not cost based pricing.  Seldom is it as simple as figuring costs and adding some profit.

An example of “what the traffic will bear” is ketchup.  Just because it costs 12 cents a gallon to produce does not mean that that should be its price.  The public perceives value far beyond that and there are good reasons for a company to charge more than the costs. 

An example of “price based costing” is the computerized mat cutter.  It could have been manufactured and sold exactly as it was originally designed and I am sure all 37 customers would still be happy with their $165,000 machines.  But in order to sell more, have an economy of scale, and build a company for the future, engineers did the real work of experimenting and testing to develop parts and procedures so that it could be sold for under $20,000.  (I was there for the development of the model 8000.  This was exactly what happened and it was fascinating to watch.)

How does this help framers?  None of you are thinking that if you join only three corners of the frame, it will cut assembly costs 25%, I hope.  There are many givens in framing where time must be spent until the job is done right.  Moulding has a price tag and you need to mark it up profitably.  (We are well aware here of the raging controversy surrounding marking up moulding – marking up cheap moulding a lot and expensive moulding a little.  Did I mention that with Wizard Retail Management you can set moulding markups exactly as you choose?)  But when it comes to doing something extra, we are always looking for - and choosing to implement - more “ketchup” items: those things that offer maximum effect for minimal effort. 

In my shop, prior to the Wizard, I chose to do ink lines, V-Grooves, inlays, and painted bevels.  They were easy for me, they went quickly, I seldom messed up, and customers reacted with smiles.  On the other hand, I detested multiple opening mats, double frames, fillets, and fabric wrapping.  In your shop these lists will be completely different.  I know one framer who lives for fabric work but won’t do a painted bevel without a gun to her head.

Probably the best avenue toward more “ketchup” items is the computerized mat cutter.  All of a sudden, V-Grooves become shaped grooves and multiple opening mats move to the “yes” list without extensive training or extra time. 

And if your solution to avoiding time consuming, non profitable things is to price them stratospherically, we can set you up with markup tables, labor rates, and surcharges to make Ewing Oil green with envy.  Scan one barcode and announce proudly to the customer how that garage sale frame can become a thing of beauty for $258.60.  Wait till you see it.

It's wonderful to see so many of you embrace a new idea.

The other day, Cyril, our financial guy, asked me why we are selling so many more of the debossing packages than everyone thought.  We took fifty sets with us to Atlanta and we brought back zero.  Kenn said he demonstrated it so much and came up with such cool designs that everyone called him “The Debossing King.”  Certainly he is not one to let a thing like that go to his head, but to be safe, refer to him as ‘Your Highness” and everything will be fine.

I gave Cyril a flip answer and told him it was because nobody listened to me when I said decorative debossing would be the next big thing.  The truth is there was no way I would have guessed all this.  When your life has been such a one note samba working on a project, you are too close to have any objectivity.  When that project keys into a view that might be just yours alone, there is every possibility everything could pass into disinterest just as easily.

Do I need to go over my take on mat decoration?  Everybody knows that I think every framer should find a way to make their shop’s work unique and that mat decoration has so many avenues and so much appeal to customers.  In mat decoration, understatement has always been a quest.  There are brash colors and overt cutting ideas, but if there was a technique that would allow us to show off without screaming louder than the art, that would be the Holy Grail.  We would use it every day and it would become our shop’s signature.

When I began working with debossing it seemed like the perfect answer.  My biggest concern was that it was my Midwestern background and my Lutheran upbringing coloring my thoughts.  Nothing has been more heartening than to see so many framers look at debossing and instantly see so many possibilities for their shops, for their artistic sensibilities and for their customers.  At last I see I am not alone in wanting to do monograms and inscriptions and intricate decorative lines that remain the surprises in the picture, saved for when the viewer is standing close.  It could be the oxymoron or our times – Subtlety sweeps the nation.

Over the next weeks, check the articles section.  I am finishing up a few articles on some more involved debossing projects based on some questions and requests at the shows.  Thank you for such a great response.  I am waiting to see what all of you come up with, too. 

What can you say about a group who goes to all the trouble of making jars of jelly for everyone there?

There should have been a report all about the Atlanta show.  It has been touted as the biggest picture framing show in the world, after all.  So many discussions about trends have led to so many predictions about shows and the future.  My report would have included a nostalgic nod to the times when several of us in the midst of the hubbub would have had an elongated discussion about the finer points of execution.  People would come into the discussion and people would leave and everyone would have left at the end of the day enlightened and excited about going back to the shop. 

The conclusion is not – why can’t this happen any more?  Rather – isn’t it great that it still happens.  There is a little more risk now.  A decade ago, everyone used the same tools and everyone was faced with the same questions.  In Atlanta, the answer to a tiny design question escalated into an explanation that generated a dozen related questions.  People gathering for a scheduled presentation entered the conversation with that blank, cow-like stare as they watched and waited for it all to make sense to them.  Probably, it never did unless they had considered designs like that or stumbled across that corner of the software.  For a guy who wants everyone at the party to have a good time, it is not ideal, but it illustrates how framers have widely differing perspectives and interests now. 

Imagine my happiness when a week later, there were 30 framers in Edmonton planning to spend all day asking and listening.  My sole responsibility was to indulge them and try not to make too big a mess.  I was able to tell all my favorite stories and show all my favorite things.  Though the group had the wider breadth of interests much like the group above, there was the luxury of time.  By the end of the day, everyone’s puzzled looks turned into a spark of understanding, another request, and maybe another happy framing customer somewhere.

A neighbor walked by my garage and said that it looks like the rest of the afternoon will be sunny.  That was the first clue that it was even close to noon, let alone past.  Saturday morning projects can be like that.  It’s a kitchen project.  I could buy something like it, sure, but I want it to fit just right and I want it to be different.  When folks look at it, I want them to marvel at its details and craftsmanship.  Then, as the fourth little piece was almost finished, I wondered how much longer this would take.  Would I be done today?  Tomorrow?  Nobody else falls asleep thinking over the construction details of stuff like this, do they?  Who would ever pay someone else - even minimum wage - to have something as simple as this, however unique it might be?

Couple that with a few of the framing projects from this month and I begin to wonder if this is a personal problem or if it is rampant throughout framing.  I needed some inspiration a while back, so I decided to do seven or eight mats with the manual mat cutter.  This was the cornerstone of our businesses for years, how much could have changed?  

It was at a friend’s shop, so I dusted it off, tuned it up, and started in.  There were two people there who had never seen one in operation.  They watched fascinated, I think.  I know they had never seen it before because they didn’t even know what questions to ask.  They didn’t care about stops or blade depth.  They never even mentioned that I was doing it left handed.

By the time this project was over, I was wondering what made me think I wanted to do this on the manual mat cutter.  There were two things I forgot.  There was the seemingly interminable moving of the stops.  These mats fit different size pictures into mats with odd sized borders.  OK, there were three things I forgot.  Math - and math mistakes.  Then there was the outside.  Granted this shop was not mine and tools were a little strange to me, but the choices for cutting the matboard to size were wholly inadequate.  

The project is finished and everyone is happy, but after years of just popping any old hunk of mat into the Wizard, I had forgotten that if the outside edges are not perfect, the mat would have all kinds of problems.  Did we really spend that much effort on just the outside edges?  And after all that, we had to hold the mat cutter head just right and set those stops just so.  Good heavens, if I must be creative, let’s have a computerized mat cutter.

The next project started with an artistic idea.  It involved a wide open groove and decorative pieces fitting into it.  Simple enough.  The first quest was to find exactly how small the detail in these decorative pieces could be.  Drawing in PathTrace, offsetting parts a hundredth of an inch here and there, cutting from the front – good.  Does anyone really care how I had to devise a couple extra shapes so that the bevels on the outside edges pointed the other way?  The real challenge came trying to get these decorative pieces to come out exactly the right size to fit into the open groove.  It should have been a math problem, but it was easier to make it a guessing game.  After much trial cutting, it looks beautiful.  Will there be a portfolio of decorative inserts for open grooves?  Not in a million years.  

There is no more worrying over perfect outside edges or setting stops.  We can stop wondering why every opening takes so long.  We have a computerized mat cutter here and the possibilities are endless.  Still, we draw things and cut trial parts and after a few of these alterations, we glance at the clock thinking – only one more test and then it will be just what I want.  It seems like whatever tool we use, there is the challenge to be creative.

In many ways we are back where we began, sanding little parts so that the doors on this cabinet fit nicely and have some flair.  We all do our share of cookie cutter stuff.  But those unique projects and those individual touches that take time and obsession make our work rewarding and make our customers love us.  Anyone who has heard me talk knows that I am amazed by the picture framing industry.  Show me another industry where every customer gets a one-of-a-kind item that lasts forever.  

I don’t want to see any of it change one little bit.