Editing The Pen Addict 655/transcript (section)

== Personal endorsement of Squarespace and its role in Enigma Stationery ==

* I'd be happy to. And in fact, yeah, I would absolutely volunteer to provide a little personal endorsement. Because, uh, yeah, not only does Squarespace sponsor this show, uh, but they're literally, yeah, they're powering enigmastationery.com. And, um, and I've used the platform kind of like you going back, you know, basically their, their whole existence. I had a lot of personal sites and other things as well. But, uh, when it came time, we, we started Enigma real small with just a couple of items and we, and we kind of transitioned through some other providers and quickly outgrew them as we expanded the assortment. And I said, well, why, why am I trying so hard? I know Squarespace. I've used it before for other things. Let's move to that. We did that a little over two years ago and, uh, it's been fantastic. So we've got, uh, you know, we, we've got a huge amount of items in, in inventory on our website and what you just described in the kind of the official ad read around the SEO integration and all that. Um, the fact that I was able to go in and connect to Google merchant services behind the scenes and it automatically pushes the entire contents of our shop directly to Google's shopping search engine. And we have found, especially over the last year or so, more and more of our, our traffic is coming directly from Google searches. So, and we're right in there with all the big players, uh, all the folks who are much, much larger than us and have deeper marketing pockets and all that. And we spend $0 on, on, you know, paid search. And yet we're consistently getting, especially on some of our harder to find items, um, that we're importing or maybe they're out of stock everywhere else. Like we're getting a lot of that directly from, uh, Google searches specifically because of that integration. So it's, uh, it's been fantastic and, uh, and, and we, we will continue to be with them for, uh, the foreseeable future. It's, uh, it's also quite affordable compared to some of the other, uh, very e-commerce focused options that are out there. Yeah. And you're saving your time and your money by having that SEO integration, right? You're paying for it in your, you know, monthly fees or whatever to Squarespace, but that's so minuscule compared to what you would spend on like an SEO. Um, you know, person or your time, you know, spending, you know, two hours or four hours a week, you know, making sure that your, your SEO is on point, especially for a very niche, uh, website that's selling like some very specific products. Right. And it's, it's all done automatically. Squarespace does a great job. So you can head over to squarespace.com and sign up for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash pen addict to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at squarespace.com slash pen addict and get 10% off your first purchase. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show and all of relay. Thanks Squarespace. Yeah. Thank you. Like I, I was not expecting this. You volunteered. Uh, it was, I literally just realized like not long ago, that's like, Oh, this is a Squarespace site. That's pretty cool. So, all right, let's get into your stationery life. Um, and I mean, you know, writing, I'm a very stationery person, but I'm also very stationery person. Um, when did you start getting into stationery at all? Like at some point I would think, you know, now that you own a stationery business, you maybe had some early inklings that you like this stuff.
* Absolutely. I think, you know, sometimes you get to points in life and I, and I, and I think I mentioned earlier, like here I am about to turn 45. Right. And so middle age is a time when you start reflecting on like how you got here and, and, and what's, what's to come and all that. And when I think back about stationery specifically, it's, it seems obvious that we ended up starting the shop because, because it feels like I've been on the path to that since I can remember. Like I can remember being an elementary student, uh, you know, so fourth, fifth grade and having extremely specific opinions about what tools I wanted to use, what kind of notepads, what kind of pens, uh, you know, you know, what kind of, you know, handwriting, uh, you know, this pen with this extra fine nib is what I want for the tiny little block letters that I want to write. Um, I mean, yeah. And, and my, uh, my mom was an office manager for various medical offices for a long, long time in my, in my childhood. And, uh, and so I spent a lot of time shopping for office supplies with her, uh, when she would, she would usually do that like in the evening. And so I'd tag along and I, I developed these, you know, very specific opinions about, Oh, well, yes, it has to be this, you know, this uniball, uh, not this, you know, not some random big pen. Now I've since, I have an appreciation now for the, the classic big crystal, but that's a whole different thing. That's an entire pot. We could just do an entire podcast on that. Absolutely. But, uh, but yeah, so I, I got, got really into, uh, you know, what I was using, what I was taking to school. Like my favorite part of the school year was always school supply shopping in August. Um, and, uh, uh, I will give you a quick, uh, uh, idea of just how into this stuff I was. Uh, I, I have a distinct memory of a period in the fifth grade when, um, I think my, my stepdad at the time must have gotten a new briefcase for his day job. And that meant the old briefcase was no longer used. And so I immediately, uh, said, I'll take it. And, um, instead of taking a backpack to school for some period of weeks in the fifth grade, you know, kids have affectations. Uh, sometimes I was the kid that brought a briefcase to school for a period of time in the fifth grade and literally like set it on my desk and unlatched it and opened it. And I had my pens and my legal pads and, um, and this is the embarrassing part that I'll go ahead and admit. I had a copy of the wall street journal because I thought that was like a very business thing. And I literally had this one copy of this daily newspaper and it stayed in there for like several, uh, several weeks.
* This is the greatest conversation ever. Like I, I am very proud of you for, for younger dance, uh, stationery game committing to the briefcase, bringing it to school. This is amazing. I, I love that so much. And as much as I'm proud of being nerdy now and not ashamed of it in any way, um, let me assure everyone who's listening as if you needed me to tell you, this was not a popular thing to do. I was definitely made fun of brutally for this. Yeah. You had no chance. This was the early nineties in Midwest United States. Uh, anti-bullying didn't exist. Uh, so I was absolutely bullied for this choice. That's all right. You owned it. You owned it. You, you, you brought that same newspaper every day. It got better. Well, I'll put it that way. It got better for sure. Do you remember any specific like stationery products? Was there a specific pen or pencil or notebook or anything that you, that you latched onto back in the day? Uh, there were definitely, I mean, yeah, everything had very specific opinions and we also, we're, we're a household that had a very limited budget. So, um, I had to sacrifice on lots of stuff to then like to, to get the trapper keeper that I wanted. The actual branded one with the cool design on it and all that I had to settle for, uh, you know, kind of store brand just about everything else. Right. And so it was, yeah, whatever, whatever notebooks were, I could be specific about, yeah, I want college rule instead of wide rule, but no, I'm, I'm getting the like 49 cent terrible spiral bound, uh, notebook from, you know, office depot or Walmart or wherever we were shopping that year. Yeah. Just getting that college ruled in that notebook though. That's a huge deal. Like that was the same thing for me is like, you know, maybe I couldn't afford like the, you know, not spending $2 on a notebook. We're going to spend, you know, 39 cents or whatever. But if I, I would search until I could find the college rule cheap enough ones to be able to get, because I just hated regular ruling to this day. Same. Yeah. Wide rule was for babies. Like, like really early on, uh, I was, I was like, no, I'm not, I'm not interested in that at all. But Uniball was definitely a big brand for me at the time. Um, that felt premium. And I probably latched onto one of those from like my mom's office. Um, and it probably like found its way into my bag and came home with me. Back at that, back in that timeframe, I mean, Uniball was, was doing really well. And like the office stationery, um, shelves and things like that. I remember you would actually be able to get Uniball products if you went to the shelf in the office or something like that, which is not really the case these days, unless you're in a very like specific, specific, you know, designery type office. That really actually cares about that. Otherwise it's just mass bulk produced. If not bringing it yourself, which it's always better to bring it yourself. Right.