As a small cottage brand that hand builds everything from scratch, we have limited production output. Through word-of-mouth, our demand has grown significantly, well beyond our ability to supply everyone. I’ve made many attempts to scale up over the year, but for better or worse, this is extremely high-skill work and the people that can do it do not exist. Those people need to be cultivated from zero and there is no blueprint for doing so or for even predicting who is going to be able to make the cut or not.
Therefore, we have no choice but to limit the amount of work that we take in, to the amount that we can and want to do. There are many methods for doing this and I’ve used a few over the years. At one point, it was just a matter of taking in whatever came in and trying to keep up. This meant working a lot and spending a lot of time trying to get people trained to help. That quickly became unsustainable and I switch to a limiter software that would simply cap the amount that could come in. This worked for a while, but as demand grew, this became ultra competitive. The software would switch over to a new month at 12am and people would hammer away on their keyboards late at night in a race to get their order in before the next. This is not an inconvenience that I wanted our customers to have and it was super glitchy, since the site was not set up to deal with that much traffic at once. People would take all this time to fill out the forms, only to get bumped by someone who was one second faster. At the worst point, things were closing out in just a few minutes. No good….Next was a random selection lottery. This worked ok, but given the number of people entering, the odds were somewhat low that any individual would get through. At the same time, I wanted a way to filter out low effort consumerism, as that crowd is better served by generalized mass-market products from companies with no-questions-asked return policies. It just doesn’t work with what we do here.
That brings us to the current merit-based quiz / lottery, which I have been extremely happy with. We are able to cater the workload to our work capacity and we can ensure that our clientele is engaged and up to the task of selecting, sizing, and using our gear appropriately. Why is that important? A disengaged and uneducated gear user requires generalized gear that will do no task well, but many tasks poorly, because the engineering goes towards covering all the misuse that an uneducated user will take it into. If a builder can ensure an educated user, it opens up huge lanes of significant performance improvements. Most of what we make here is intended to hit a higher performance standard by putting specialized gear in the hands of educated users.
Despite this rather obvious benefit, there is a consumer entitlement that is deeply offended by this system. Typical criticisms are ” I don’t want to know this stuff. I want the builder to know this stuff. “. Or that it is ” elitist ” or ” exclusionary “. I’ve found that many of the people who are not willing to understand the gear are also not willing to really understand the situation.
” I don’t want to know this stuff. I want the builder to know this stuff. “
Specialized gear often requires you to know this stuff in order to hit the expected performance. Usually, misusing specialized gear results in terrible performance, at which point the uneducated user that doesn’t know any better, would blame the gear. We provide lots of feature customizations and custom dimensions. As a remote, bespoke operation, good measurements and understanding are essential to hitting a target without having the person or associated item in hand. Potential consumers need to be able to read, understand, and perform their due diligence in order to succeed in ordering functional gear from us.
It is ” elitist “
I think there is big difference between elitist and elite. Elitist denotes favoritism towards privilege, wealth, class, and status. This is actually one of the things I’m trying to avoid. One of the most common strategies for limiting workload is to raise prices. Raising prices means fewer people want to order, so it is less work for you, and you get more money for that work. Well, that doesn’t sit well with me at all. I mean, sure, more money for less work sound great, but I certainly don’t want Timmermade gear to only be available to wealthy people. I want it to be available to people like me. Or to the many thru-hikers bumming around. Or the people who are on a super limited budget while taking a break from work / school to hike a trail.
It is ” exclusionary “
This denotes unfairly restricting certain groups. This system does not exclude anyone from any specific group. It asks relevant questions, related to the selection, sizing, and use of the gear we make. I have put soooo much work into the educational material on our website, and it is made clearly available to anyone. The questions being asked in the lottery are all available, right on the website. Any math involved is basic grade school geometry. Essay quizzes are usually basic concepts covered in multiple locations on the website. I think ” exclusionary ” would be if we only made this information available to people who’ve hiked a certain number of miles or something, so that only those people could access the information required to answer the questions. Anyone can get any of this information on the website. The only people who are being excluded are the ones who are not willing to go get it. There is an argument that maybe some people are not good at basic math or not good at essay writing and it has been heard. I go to great lengths to vary the type of questions. Sometimes there is math. Sometimes there is writing. There is always going to be reading comprehension, simply because there is no way around that being absolutely essential for proper selection and sizing. Sometimes there are easier quizzes that allow a ton of people in and it becomes a large pool random lottery. Sometimes there are harder quizzes that reward the elite folks with really good odds of getting in. Besides, we aren’t talking about excluding people from outdoor gear. If anything, we are simply excluding low effort consumers from super niche, specialized gear. There is a sea of other options to get out there with. Nobody absolutely NEEDS a Timmermade thing. There is no Timmermade thing that is the only thing preventing someone from going on a hike. I mean….right?
On top of those explanations, we recently been making an effort to build some items for our On-the-Shelf section, which is all available immediately, without any lottery participation. I hope to build this section up more, with the items we sell that are more general and less specialized. Hopefully this can serve more of the folks who need things quickly or haven’t succeeded in the quiz / lottery or don’t want to participate in it.
Honestly, all this just seems like some consumer entitlement, offended that they can’t have everything they want, when they want it, with no work at all. That really isn’t unexpected, as that is where our society seems to be going. More and more tech doing all the work for more and more incompetent humans. We seem to be making ourselves obsolete, while all the money gets sucked up from the bottom, right into the pockets of the handful of people at the top. Getting off topic here, but this trend is not something I want to support. I want to see humans doing more. You could have a robot or child on the other side of the globe build you a down jacket for $150 or whatever, but this hurts everyone. AI spits out generic answers for us that are often completely wrong so that we don’t have to think for ourselves. Sure, handy sometimes. More often making people way dumber.
We are engaging in a handcraft, which requires a human touch. I hope our customers are engaging in adventures with gear that requires a human touch.