Write On! – Planning is Never Easy

The secret's out, 4th Quarter planning is never easy. In fact, in my decade-long experience with Karas Pen Co and another half decade before that in retail management, it's only gotten harder as time has gone on. I knew this would be an uphill battle early on, and we've implemented a variety of methods in an attempt to make this process easier. However, no matter how hard we try, the planning during for 4th Quarter is almost always a "fly by the seat of your pants" exercise. It ends up being the beginning of the holiday stress load in our lives, and in the few years where I attempted to start the process at the beginning of the calendar year, has made the whole year an unbearable mess.

What is our 4th Quarter planning process anyway and why is it now more a "loose" set of guidelines rather than something set in stone. We tend to set aside this part of the year with a schedule that has hard target dates rather than allowing for flexibility. In an effort to provide more structure for our customers so they can plan out their holiday purchases better, we have specific windows on our releases in the months of October, November, and December. This starts with the Halloween releases which are scheduled for the final two weeks of October, ideally ending ON Halloween. The idea is to get these up and sold before Fountain Pen Friday which we consider the start of our holiday Special and Limited Release period. From that time on, we try to have at least on release per week that is very limited or something that we've never released before. Our Black Friday and Small Business Saturday releases are the next in the queue, and we have hard dates for those releases ON those days. Finally our Anniversary release is now always the first week of December. Anything else we release gets slotted around those major releases. It doesn't seem like a lot, but the reality is that this normally amounts to 10-15 different pens in quantities from 20 to 200 per release. Again, not that much when you add them all up, but they almost all rely on outside processes, and that's where the rub is.

As much as it's hard to keep to our own production schedule deadlines, it is impossible to plan for how wrong things can go when you rely on an outside process to bring a finished product to market. Some of our collaborators are far easier to plan on, like our Cerakote applicator. He is very good about meeting deadlines, but it's also easier for us to get product to him because he doesn't have minimums we need to try to meet in order to keep our costs lower. In contrast, our anodizers are not that easy to plan around. In fact, more than once our anodizers have made mistakes to colossal, it required pushing product releases back nearly a year. These issues often happen when we send some of our larger orders like the release of the Reaktor line or Retraktable pencils. Both of those releases got pushed over 8 months because the product was damaged. The plating company we've used in the past does not even provide us with timeframes for completion of work, and our stamping and box producers are two companies that can be weeks ahead of schedule or months late. It's just how things are when it comes to needing external assistance on product releases.

That isn't to say we are immune to shooting ourselves in the foot now and again...and again...and again. We've been known to miscalculate our ability to get production runs complete on time. This has been a constant until we began building in a few weeks of wiggle room, well sometimes a few months of wiggle room, depending on the complexity of the product. Some production runs are completely worry-free with every step along the process going off with out hitch. Then there are the times when a simple miscount on how much material is available results in a months long delay while we wait for more material to get shipped out to us. No one is perfect, and we've felt the sting of our own mistakes often enough that we now plan for things to go wrong and if they don't we celebrate with an early release. This has allowed us to get better rest knowing we weren't as susceptible to planning issues as we had been in the past.

Our 4th Quarter planning for 2025 hasn't been an easy process, but it's been better than in years past. We are confident we can meet the deadlines we've established barring actual emergencies. The next 6 weeks is planned out nicely and we have half of the releases already back in our hands. Over the next two week we'll begin to get Novembers releases sent out to anodize and Cerakote while we work on the products that require in-house finishing. We'll pause our prototyping processes in November, and buckle down on the final push with some special Holiday Gift Boxes, Grab Bags, and Mystery Box releases, along with a few last minute Club Exclusives. Those will be rather easy to put together because we've planned for them all year long. And before we know it, we'll be sitting down to plan out 2026 which seems like an impossible task right now. Hopefully the planning for that is easier than the planning for 2025, but that's always my hope. We'll just have to see how it goes.