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Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the future

7/8/16       
Cabmaker

Apathy
Complacency
Ambivalence
Empathy

These words are useful to understand in neutral connotation.

Apathy doesn't mean that you don't care, it just means that you just haven't given something any consideration.

I recently had no opinion about the proper diameter of a sewing needle because I never had to use one. I bought some great house trousers from Lands End and realized that in order to get the bagginess I want in the crotch I needed to buy oversize at the elastic waist band part. This necessitated that I take in the waist band a bit. I now know that needles with big eyes (for poor eyes) are pretty stout and hard to push through three thicknesses of cloth. I am now no longer apathetic to why people buy sewing thimbles.

Complacency is the sense of well being you have because you are unaware of impending information. You walk right out into the street because you're not aware of that bus coming directly at you.

Ambivalence is when you can't decide whether or not to walk across the street because you are aware that there are buses lurking nearby. You are in this sense "bi" and cannot make a selection. (As I get older I realize life might have been better if I had of been more philosophical.)

Empathy does not mean sympathy. You do not need to care anything about your fellow man but in a zero-sum-game world it would beneficial to be able to understand them and what motivates them. Think of empathy like ju-jitsu.

So I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about how Pinterest is creating algorithms that allow you to take a photograph of anything you see any where in the world and find out where to buy it. This will affect how advertising dollars will be allocated, which may contain the seeds for Amazon's next great competitor.

The digital landscape brings with it the imperative to understand and get good at social media. Houzz brings me most of my kitchen customers. Yelp means I have to be nice to anyone who finds me on the internet. Uber & Apple will one day merge to create the driverless car and, in due course, fire all the current drivers of these privately owned automobiles.

Uber has been selling us on the concept of the "sharing" economy by saying they merely provide a mechanism for the indigent to pay their mortgage. As soon, however, as they no longer need to "share" the revenue these poor schlubs will be out on the street, literally.

With no revenue to pay for their housing, and a plethora of unnecessary automobiles they will be forced to live in their car.

The cars will be stacked up and welded together into car hotels. The entrepreneurial opportunity for the enterprising cabinetmaker will be in how to furnish these automobiles.

(Did anybody notice the product placement for LandsEnd pajamas?)

7/8/16       #2: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
jonathan mahnken

Hey Im working on it! Just landed a job building a dinette for an air stream trailer. Next will be buses and motor homes. Eventually i will work my way into " Car furniture" lol.

7/8/16       #3: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
jonathan mahnken

In all seriousness though. What Does the future look like for the small custom maker. It used to be kind of a sure thing. We had the sizes, quality, and look that the larger manufacturers didnt. Now the big boys have the custom sizes, bullet proof finishes and turnaround times that we cant even begin to compete with. I find myself having to emulate factory made stuff more and more per the customers request. It really seems that my customer base has shriveled over the last decade. Only the very wealthy want to pay me for my work. The middle/upper middle classes only hire me when they absolutely have to or they are particularly interested in high quality.

7/9/16       #4: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
Nick Cook Member

The future is as Jim Rohn said, opportunity mixed with difficulty. It's been that way for the last 6 thousand years. He also said it's not the wind that determines your destination, but rather the set of the sail. For me life is about serving people with my skills and justice says I should be compensated for my service. I do this in the context of my business. The market place will never cease to have needs. There are 10 thousand needs. I'm sure I can find one of those that is rewarding and in demand in the event that my current avenue diminishes. Along the way you get to work with people and customers and hopefully contribute to their lives.

7/9/16       #5: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
Cabmaker

What prompted this post was the article about Pinterest. Right now Amazon is my go to vendor because of convenience and access. They present the information in a standardized format and usually have enough product to handle most of my needs.

When Pinterest rolls out it's new image identification program this landscape will change and with it our conduit to the manufacturer (who may now become his own retailer). In this way the landscape changes for the manufacturer who must now figure out how distribution on a one-at-a-time basis.

This is related to my product placement quip about Lands End pajamas (which by the way are the most comfortable I have ever worn. Great pockets, soft & robust cloth!)

The WSJ had an article the other day about how ad-blockers have pretty much destroyed browsers as a mechanism for advertising. If Pepsi or Coke now want to get information in front of the buying public they have to create compelling content, tell a story and have the protagonist enjoy a cold beverage while sitting around in his Lands End pajamas that are so comfortable.

Which of course makes me think about my own relevance as a manufacturer. When the markets crashed several years ago my company was going strong. By virtue of our company name we were at the top of any google search . Our website also had (at the time) better photography than any local cabinet shop. We had most of the work. We built 45 kitchens between 2010 & 2011. Four different cabinet shop owners worked for wages in our shop just to produce enough revenue to keep their doors open. Everything was working.............until it wasn't.

The first clue was when the phone didn't ring for three months.

It wasn't until a customer asked why my work couldn't be found on social media that I realized the buying public had found a new watering hole. Instead of relying on Google for information the buying public was now doing their shopping on crowd sourced platforms.

My complacency almost caused my extinction.

7/9/16       #6: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
Pat Gilbert

"The first clue was when the phone didn't ring for three months.

It wasn't until a customer asked why my work couldn't be found on social media that I realized the buying public had found a new watering hole. Instead of relying on Google for information the buying public was now doing their shopping on crowd sourced platforms.

My complacency almost caused my extinction."

Excellent!

7/9/16       #7: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
Nick Cook Member

Website: http://www.cedarrivercabinetry.com

Cabmaker,

The crowd sourced platforms are? Houzz, Pinterest? Fakebook? Did you implement a marketing strategy that put you on those platforms?

7/10/16       #8: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
TonyF

“Give me convenience or give me death” – The Dead Kennedys. Patrick Henry will not be happy that America has redefined liberty as convenience.

The original thread, with its musings about redefining negative-leaning words into a neutral context and making it sound as though the future of your business will depend on how many “friends” and “likes” you have seems to negate the idea of a good reputation and repeat business.

(Although for some inexplicable reason, perhaps either through subliminal direction or by virtue of original thought, I have ordered 50 pair of Land’s End pajamas.)

If keeping up one’s web site has gone the way of revisiting your Yellow Pages ad, then I am not sure what will distinguish your business from the clutter that occupies the crowd sourced media. Will your reputation now be “like” based? Has this really become the go-to method for purchasing everything, or is this just another bubble?

Complacency takes on many forms, such as thinking that advertising on crowd sourced media will keep your doors open. You can choose a solution and still have a problem. I would think (and hope) that a solid reputation and word of mouth would be a greater and more reliable source of future work. Perhaps that is just “buggy-whip thinking”. Maybe I should just call it quits.

Could the fact that “your phone stopped ringing” possibly mean that the recession had caught up with you as well? Could the conversion of your advertising to crowd sourced media, and whatever subsequent sales that may have provided, perhaps coincide with an improved economy?

Possibly I am just too long in the tooth, but I cannot fathom that someone will make a purchase decision about custom woodworking built-ins while perusing their phone during their child’s Little League game. If that is in fact the case, then the world is changing too fast for me to absorb and act positively on the changes. I am glad that I am as old as I am, so that my complacency can be explained by saying “He’s just an out of touch old-timer.”

TonyF

7/10/16       #9: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
cabmaker

Tony,

It used to be whenever I needed a new coat I would drive to the closest shopping mall, walk directly into an Eddie Bauer store, buy a coat and get back into my car as soon as possible. I would rather take a beating than go clothes shopping. I knew from direct experience I could always count on the quality an Eddie Bauer coat.
Today I don't need to drive anywhere and the UPS man (I call him Jeeves) will show up with the most comfortable plaid Lands End pajamas (in any color I want).

Life for the brick & mortar merchant has really changed a lot. The profits for these companies probably derive from their online sales. The stores are just a way to put a face on the business and establish credibility. General Electric, for example, is really just a finance company. The washers & dryers just exist for brand differentiation.

You are right that no one is going to make a decision to buy cabinets from you based on some pictures they see on their i-phone but these pictures are how they hear about you. You can ignore social media if you want but you do so at your own peril. Our customers are half our age now and it behooves us to figure out what watering hole they get their nourishment from rather than insist they come to ours.

You are right that merely having a website and expecting that it will produce sales and a profit is also just another form of complacency. You need to have a good product and you need to be useful.

7/10/16       #10: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
TonyF

Cabmaker:

Yes, one ignores the new methodology of communication at one’s peril. Such is the ubiquitous phone, which is now being used for everything but a phone. (I get calls on Father’s Day, and texts the rest of the year.)

Much like you, I would make the trip to the brick and mortar store, get only what I came for, and leave. While that seems quaint, the mall parking lot is nonetheless still packed.

When the Internet reared its head, I thought that this was the perfect sales venue for items that were of a known quality (i.e., books and recorded music, as these are primarily fungible products that do not require tactile sensory perception). The upshot was that even the more obscure items were in stock if, much as myself, one does not run with the herd with respect to musical or literary tastes.

For other items, unless they were also of known quality, I always thought that there was some level of risk involved, as one could not perceive quality by looking at an item on the screen. This does not seem to matter to others in the way that it matters to me. But I digress.

All in all, I suppose that the crowd sourced platforms are nothing more than a digital sandwich board, merely pushing potential sales in your direction. Still, what I would find most troubling about the crowd sourced platforms is how someone can post negative feedback, apropos of no interaction with you, your products, or your business. This feedback seems to have a very long half-life.

And where this was once called libel, which is an actionable offense, there currently seems to be no recourse for this action. (That’s OK, I wasn’t using my constitutional rights anyway)

The providers of these platforms (Houzz, Angies List, etc.) seem to always want to “upsell” you, and have you purchase their service, which makes you a “preferred” vendor and bumps you up in the ordered listing, otherwise you get buried in the heap. These services are expensive, and there has been much debate on this forum about the cost-effectiveness of these services.

Perhaps you can just buy a reputation anymore, or have enough "friends" "like" you, such that a good reputation is percieved, rather than earned. As with anything, you pay your money and you take your chances.

TonyF

7/10/16       #11: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
jonathan mahnken

One of my reservations about social media marketing has been the inability to protect my reputation. For instance I have one negative yelp review from someone that I have no recollection of ever speaking with, much less actually doing business with. And for the longest time I didnt even know it. Libel indeed. And yes it has a very long half life. This was apparently many years ago and it still exists. That being said, I still recognize the need to create a facebook page and pintrest link for my business. In every business you have to go with the flow of whats hip and happenin! Lol

7/11/16       #12: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
Larry

I've personally developed a deep distrust of the little I've read on social media. Herd mentality @ it's finest. We don't have a presence on any of them. We have no advertising, no salesmen, no showroom. We have more work than we can do. The problem isn't getting work, it's adding functional employees. We get calls from companies I've never heard of asking about getting a pretzel shaped cabinet. Old Out of Touch Guy

7/12/16       #13: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
David R Sochar Member

Cabinetmaking in the Future may not be cabinetmaking as the term is used on this forum.

It will all become ever more automated in the big shops, smashing any small shop on price, service, details, selection, etc.

What is left? Niches. Just as the Graduate was advised "One word - Plastics!", I would say "Niches". Super high end cabinets that the bigs do not want or can't do - the inlay, the curves, the carving, the details. Restoration work in furniture or architectural items. Fitted offices, paneled rooms, toys, doors, staircases, true reproductions, and other wood items that are either of a highly skilled nature, or of an artisan nature. Creativity will be at the heart of any New Success - creativity in finding the niches and in developing the products.

The days of a guy with a table saw and the car out in the driveway are about over. There are still bargain hunters that see this as a way to save a few bucks, but at some risk. That will fade as the bottom of the market (and all the rest of the market) is well served by automated boxes.

The nature of the woodworker will change, from someone skilled at busting up sheets of melamine and stapling them back together, outsourcing doors and drawers, installing and repeating - to someone that is creative and knows how to learn to acquire new skills, new areas to exploit, as well as marketing and business management beyond money in the pocket.

Now, the guy in the garage with a vacuum bag doing inlaid table tops, or carving on a furniture piece may just be more viable now than a few years ago.

There is always a shortage of highly skilled, capable, informed craftsmen. This will only be more true in the future, driving pricing up to where it once again becomes a living wage. No more cutting your own throat to stay alive, so to speak.

7/13/16       #14: Cabinetmaking Opportunities in the ...
Pat Gilbert

I agree about niches.

Pay attention to technology and how that can help you exploit a niche.

The key is ALWAYS going to be about productivity, if something helps you be more productive keep it if not dump


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