Case study: Barking Mad
25 May 2011
Barking Mad make original,
quirky gift cards for all occasions. Artist Crispin Korschen’s world is full of
tall and spindly happy-go-lucky characters traversing surreal backgrounds but the
message is always clear enough whether it’s a simple “I love you” or something more
complex. Well organised, with a team on the ground to handle sales and manufacturing,
the Barking Mad website is both a shopping cart site where gifts can be ordered
direct and a display for retailers of the Barking Mad range. We spoke to Crispin
to find out what makes Barking Mad so bleeding successful.
Tell us about Barking Mad?
There are four of us. I’m the artist and the designer and also the front-person,
if you like. Lucy Meek is my sales rep - she’s up in Auckland and then I have Toni
(Schreuder) who’s in the office with me and Bill (Davies) who makes parts for a
range of our products and if we’ve got a technical problem it’s Bill who will be
brought in to sort it out. We like to be quirky and we like to be a little bit different.
We’re all a little bit crazy and the name just sums us up.
We started Barking Mad five years ago. We used to have another website but it was
difficult to work with. Someone had to update it for us and I’d have to call them
up and then we’d be going over the problem back and forth. She eventually put me
on to you guys and it’s been perfect. It’s so easy.
What do you like about Smallfish?
It’s very straight-forward, very easy to understand. I love the way it keeps adding
to itself: people suggest something and you guys try and do it. For example, in
the beginning when I wanted to be able to change the listed order of products myself,
I had to put A in front of things to get it to the top of the page but now that’s
been changed. The really nice thing about Smallfish is that it just keeps getting
better.
Before we started using Smallfish we didn’t have a shopping cart. Primarily the
website was there for retailers to use as an online catalogue but we were happy
to sell to the public and we always put the retail prices on there. The retailers
know the wholesale prices, or they ask us. If you have a site that does wholesale
as well as retail you’ll need to have a section that is only for retailers that
you have to log into. Since we’ve been using Smallfish and had the shopping cart,
we’re able to push the online sales more.
How do you advertise?
What we try and do is get free publicity. For example, my house has just been featured
in House and Garden and I’m able to talk about my art and Barking Mad that way;
or we’ll get into the hotspots of the shopping guides in magazines or small newspapers.
We try and get as much PR as we can. All of our products have our web address on
them so we also get a lot of people that have either received or bought cards and
then go “oh I’ve gotta see the website”
We always ask our customers how they found us. Most have seen the product in a shop
and then come to the site. When I look at Google Analytics we do get hits from overseas
from people who have been surfing the net and end up buying our products. Often
our overseas buyers have been in New Zealand and they’ve seen us in a shop, sometimes
they’ve bought a product and when they get home they regret they didn’t buy more.
How would you describe your art?
I find it hard to describe my art. Some people have said to me I paint “visual metaphors”
and I think that’s probably quite a good description of what I do. I’m not a landscape
artist or anything like that. My art always involves people and I’ve always got
words as well, so the titles are as important as the image.
Sometimes I’ve got the words and then I think of a painting, sometimes I’ve got
an image and then I think of the words. I used to be far more wicked when I started,
they had more black humour. Its funny, I’ve actually got sweeter: you probably end
up painting what people want without realising it. When we’re designing a card we’re
very careful that we don’t just randomly pick one of my paintings and stick it on
a greeting card. There are ones that are a little bit more obscure but we try and
make sure that they fit a range of occasions. People buy a card for the occasion;
they don’t buy it for the picture. If they like the picture as well that’s great
but it’s always for a purpose.
Barking Mad Promotion
We love it when customers tell us stories about the wonderful people they’ve given
our goodies to. Barking Mad have decided that once a month we would like to send
a free treat to a special someone - one of those fabulous people out there doing
great things for other people or carrying on through their day even when it's tough.
All you have to do is send us an email at
barking.mad@paradise.net.nz with the name of the person you’d like to recommend
and the reasons why. We'll make the hard decision and pick someone we think deserves
a free treat the most. Then we'll let them know that they can choose something for
free off our website (excluding resin image panels) as a reward for being the bee’s
knees.
Visit Barking Mad