Fortunato Chocolate and Black Friday
Hello and good day!
All around, I am starting to see and hear advertisements for Black Friday. It sounds like there are going to be some excellent deals out there.
For our part, we are not going to offer any Black Friday discounts.
Here is why. We offer our absolute best prices at all times.Our prices are the lowest we can possibly offer while still being able to pay huge premiums to cacao farmers and sustain a middle class lifestyle for our families.
As a business owner, I have always found Black Friday sales peculiar. Actually, a better word is suspicious.
If the company can shave 40% off their price in order to induce a tremendous volume of sales the day after Thanksgiving, why don't they give that price all the time?
If a company can make money at price points that are significantly lower, but they choose not to offer those prices all year long, customers are overpaying all day every day, and just clawing back a tiny percentage of overpayments on this one day.
I don't like that.
There is another possibility.Perhaps businesses are working on a market share strategy. They sell merchandise at a loss or break even on this one day to get people into the store. And they hope that you will like the store so much that you'll come back even after the sale is over.
This way, they use the discounting as a loss leader to get new long term customers.
That makes some sense.But what are new customers going to think when they come back and your prices a 25% higher than on Black Friday?
They will probably go back to shopping wherever they shop all year long that has the prices they like and wait to come back until next Black Friday, in which case the strategy is a failure.
You've only induced people to shop on days when you break even or lose some money.It seems to me that on the whole, the people who benefit greatly from Black Friday are savvy shoppers.
You shop with companies who offer a fair price throughout the year, and then you can jump over to the deals on just this one day.C
This way you can have your cake and eat it too.
For the shoppers who go that route, more power to you.Even if our regular customers were to abandon us on Black Friday and go with some other chocolate company, that would be fine by us.
The cacao harvest lasts 8 long months, from January through August. In order to survive as a business, we need customers to patronize us all year long. Our goal is to be the primary chocolate in a person's life. We're not jealous. There are a lot of good chocolates out there in the world. We hope you'll give them all a whirl.
But our honest desire is to have a special place in your heart and home, not just during the holiday season, but all year round.To pull that off, we aren't looking to be a wildly expensive premium brand with fat margins who can then discount liberally come Black Friday.
No, we figure the best way to be in somebody's life on an ongoing basis is to offer premium products at a price that allows us to pursue the company's purpose, and no more.
This squares well with who we are deep down.
My dad is from Ft. Wayne, Indiana and my brother and I were raised with a good old midwestern outlook on life.You give people a square deal on principal.
Back when we first got started, we attempted to be the highest priced premium product on the market. In those days we were selling to high end, fancy restaurants and chocolatiers.
They used to buy our chocolate at a wholesale price, similar to what we are charging on our website right now, and then they'd melt it down and sell it for $80 a pound.
To be honest with you, that never sat right with us.
Because what you are really paying for in that case is the fanciness of the setting, not the chocolate. I have no problem with folks who like beautiful restaurants and high end cuisine. I like them too, and our family indulges in a night out at restaurants of that sort from time to time.
But I liked them more before I understood the pricing. I know that the chocolate in a dessert is marked up 4 or 5 times. And I know that the establishment could make a profit at half the price if the setting was a little more stripped down.
The food would be exactly the same, and I personally go to a place like that for the great food made by an experienced chef, not the fanciness of the surroundings.
I'd be happy eating great food in just about any environment. It is all about the food for me.
Anyhow, once we got our head around that whole thing, we became some of the most out of place chocolate suppliers you've ever seen.
Simple, middle class kind of people, without a luxurious bone in our body, selling chocolate to luxury establishments, with the knowledge that people with our same sensibilities wouldn't be enjoying our chocolate very much.
It worked out because our chocolate was good. It was undeniable. The restaurants and chocolatiers had to have it. But it was in spite of who we are as people, believe me.
That is why we are so happy with what we've been doing since the beginning of 2020.
2009 - 2019 was our high end luxury chocolate phase.
2020 - the rest of eternity, hopefully, is our give the best price for great chocolate to salt of the earth, hard working folks like ourselves phase.
That is why we have nothing left to give on Black Friday.
We give it everyday. Our margins are already as low as they can be.Hopefully you will give us a pass for not having any deals come Friday, November 25.
And maybe you'll consider gifting some Fortunato Chocolate as a gift even though we'll be offering the same prices we always offer.
Even if you don't, hopefully we'll continue to see you all year long. That is more important to us anyhow.
Thank you so much for your time today.
I hope that you have a truly blessed day!
Adam
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