In 9th grade, a girl named Lacey Kleckner offered to make me a hemp necklace. I happily accepted her offer but didn’t understand why she wasn’t selling them. They took about an hour each and she had WAY more people requesting them than she had time to make.
So I asked if she wanted to start a business. I’d set up the website, she’d make the jewelry. And so, on May 9, 2001, “Cool Strings” was born.
Thanks to Archive.org, I can show you snapshots of the development of the website. Version 1 had an online ordering form that went to some other URL that I’d manually check. I’d write down the orders, come into school the next day, and tell Lacey who it was that ordered and what they ordered. Payments by checks made the process a slow one…
By December 2001, I was able to integrate a PayPal shopping cart and a “Product of the Month” feature. To enable the shopping cart, I painstakingly added hundreds of “add to cart” buttons throughout the different ~30 design pages, for each type (necklace, bracelet, or anklet) — and allowing for choice of size.
By May 2002, I overhauled the website and added an FAQ, a Representative program, and Testimonials.
In September 2002, after attending an Ithaca Summer College Business program, I came home with a new idea: to sell the supplies needed to make the jewelry in addition to the necklaces, bracelets, and anklets. So I added a large Supplies section of the website that would automatically show items based on my inventory (that I would manually adjust). I also added a survey on the front page, re-designed the website once again (this time, with dragons as the company logo), and categorized the jewelry into categories (instead of Gallery 1, 2, 3, etc.). I was really proud of the product code system I used, which helped me identify what was ordered and where it was located in my inventory just from this code (which would be sent to me in an email from PayPal once payment was received). To give you an idea of how the product codes worked, the code for a 100 pack of 5mm black wooden beads was WB5A20, where WB = Wooden Bead, 5 = 5 mm, A = container A, and 20 = column 2, top row of my supplies cabinet.
All the while, Lacey continued to make more and more jewelry. While this was happening, the supplies business grew very quickly. To give you an idea of our revenue, in our very first month of operation, Cool Strings made $100 gross income. In month two, we made $200. We made $400 in month three, $800 in month four, and broke $1,000 in month five (and remained around the $1200-$1300/mo mark for a while). Our profit margins were roughly 50% (very low website fees and Lacey accepted a bulk payment at the end of the month instead of a per-necklace payment). Getting checks for a few hundred dollars each month seemed outstanding at the time.
In October of 2003, I found a guy on eLance.com who was willing to redesign the website for $150. He did it for so little because he wanted to learn how to integrate PayPal into a website and he wanted practice using PHP. The new website design was significantly nicer than my previous attempts. He also integrated some cool new features: an easier-to-use backend that allowed me to keep track of my stock of supplies and a rotating specials list that would automatically discount selected items by 10%.
The site remained the same for the next ~12 months. At this point, I decided to let the inventory run out and shut down the site. For the last year while we were in business, Google AdWords and Overture rates cut so deeply into our profits that Lacey was making a ton of jewelry for very little money (I’m sorry, Lacey!). The good thing about this business in the early days was that Overture initially didn’t have a minimum bid on its search results– and there were very few hemp/beaded jewelry companies out there– so we snagged the 1st or 2nd spot on most terms. As time passed, they introduced a 5 cent minimum bid…then a 10 cent minimum bid… and then other competitors started competing for the top spots, making it much more expensive to drive traffic to our website.
Cool Strings didn’t make Lacey nor I millionaires, but it was certainly a fun project. Thank you, Archive.org, for capturing the progress of Cool Strings. And thank you, Lacey, for working countless hours, putting hemp jewelry in the hands of thousands of people across the world, and for always having a smile on your face!
