Closing out 2015

In a few hours it'll be the end of Foster Leathercraft's second year in operation.  All in all it hasn't been too bad on the business side.  It's been a vast improvement over 2014 and there'll be some new things to look forward to in 2016 (should be another post about that tomorrow).

This last year has had quite a few events in it.  From attending the first PAX South in the closest thing I have to a "home city" to tromping around a good portion of Europe.  I got to see the Mythbusters live one more time and I started DMing again.

It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, of course.  I'm still pretty disappointed with Tandy.  In the process of reaching out to other communities I haven't been in contact with for awhile there's certainly plenty of other people who've had their own disappointing experiences with Tandy.  I put a lot of thought into whether or not to initiate any legal actions following my incident.  I fully believe that Tandy's policy is both ethically wrong and legally inappropriate but litigation would be complicated and expensive, especially since I'm roughly 3,000 miles from where it would probably be argued.  So I've settled for filing a complaint with the Dallas DA's office.  I don't know that anything will come of that but it at least makes it part of the public record.  And perhaps it will lend some ammunition to anyone else who takes that particular fight to a courtroom.  Either way, the corporate side of Tandy has seen to it that they won't be seeing any more of my business.

Speaking of my business, I shipped about a hundred orders this last year.  That makes the math pretty easy to figure out how they broke down.  75% of the orders went to the US, which isn't any big surprise. About 12% went to international destinations, mostly Australia and the UK.  The rest wound up somewhere in Canada.  Shoulder straps made up about 40% of all my orders, which wasn't bad for something I originally listed because I had a spare laying around.  March and May tied for the slowest months in terms of the orders coming in, but I was practically gone for half of May.  Likewise, July and Dec tied for the highest number of orders, followed by June and October.  So, for this year at least, it doesn't look like the belief in slow internet sales over the summer is really reflected by the data.

Meanwhile, things are looking up for 2016! More on that tomorrow! Happy New Year!