Flipping Birds

Ever wonder why I keep blathering on about kite season?

Bird kites are my last product line that still sells reliably at full price, because they really work, and because there’s not a ton of online competition. People buy predator kites to scare birds away from their gardens, orchards, boats, or wherever birds are a pest (many parks and golf courses report that the Bald Eagle effectively repels geese, when nothing else works). Far and away the biggest market, that season runs from April through August. Hunters buy goose and duck kites as decoys; this smaller market gives me a bump in the fall. Ordinarily, Christians get the ball rolling when they buy dove kites for church plays at Easter and Pentecost. The manufacturer ran out of doves last fall, promising to have more “in the spring,” but they missed Easter. (When they run out of a style, it often takes them a year or more to replenish; I don’t know why). The smaller Create-a-Bird covers that same niche, and the other “small birds” are used in school plays and community theater productions. Some businesses buy kites as marketing gimmicks, and (finally) some people fly them for fun, or as decorations. 

Curio City will stay open through the summer if bird kites sell well enough to pay its expenses. Anything else I can move is just the gravy for that meat. If kite season doesn’t materialize for some reason – and without doves this Easter, it’s already late – then I’ll close down my store earlier than I had planned. One cannot live on gravy.

The very first product that I bought in 2005 – SKU 1, still available today – was the Canada Goose. I eventually added the other birds, but they languished until I made two conceptual breakthroughs. First, Jackite offered to dropship. That meant that I could offer poles as an add-on without having to stock and ship them myself – something I had found to be impractical because they don’t fit in a standard-sized kite tube. Second, I found some third-party YouTube videos of kites in action and learned how to embed them in my pages. Video sells. After years of barely hanging in there, bird kites finally took off. 

How many kites are we talking about? I’ve sold 105 Canada geese since that first one. The more popular falcon and osprey kites have sold 345 and 520, respectively. That’s nearly 1,000 kites right there, at $40 a pop. I’ve moved 243 top-of-the-line eagles at $70 apiece. Christians have bought 452 doves. Create-a-bird only fetches $13, but 857 of those have flown out of here. I won’t go through all the lesser kites – Snow Goose, for example, has only sold 18 pieces – but I’ve sold 3,000+ bird kites, and most of those were in the past five or six years. Add in add-ons like poles (roughly 322 sold), line rigs (1,100 at $4), and pole mounts, and – well, you can see why I’d like to milk one last kite season, and why it has to materialize to keep me going.

That business is late, as I keep saying, but I won’t give up on it until Memorial Day. Eventually someone will come along with a better website or lower prices or a “free shipping” gimmick, because someone always moves in on successful products sooner or later. One cannot fend off competitors without money and talent, neither of which I have in abundance. But AFAIK nobody else is eating my lunch yet. 

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I finally removed my phone number entirely from Curio City’s website. It will cost me some sales and save me some aggravation. The days when I’d do anything to maximize sales ended long ago. The volume of junk calls dropped after I deleted it from the “Contact number” heading on my contact page and re-recorded my voicemail message to mention only Blue Hills Editorial Services, so this last move should get rid of the few calls. Shoppers have to work hard to find my phone number now.