PuckShots Christmas Message 2016
Once again, Joanna and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the hockey communities in Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario. While it has meant a lot of 7-day work weeks with late nights designing, printing, sorting, booking, distributing and answering emails, I’ve loved every day of this “Hockey-preneurship”. Thank you parents, coaches, managers and especially players! 🙂
Sticker Shock
Every season we try to anticipate our workload so we can keep on top of things. We photographed 91 teams up to this point (compared to 82 last year) but BucketDecals (my hockey helmet decals business) has had orders rolling in from all over Canada (and a few USA) right up until Christmas eve creating a balancing act.
New (this) Year
This year we debuted a new product: The CoolEdge Photo Collage which has been a really popular item. We’ve also had a great response from customers for being able to accept Interac at the rink.
One part of PuckShots that has been very fun has been documenting the season over Instagram. Parents and players have told us that they’ve enjoyed following along and indeed, upon arriving at some shoots players are asking what we’ll be posting on Instagram. If you haven’t been already, you can follow us at http://instagram/puck_shots
Hacker Headaches
Probably the biggest challenge of the season was dealing with hackers. Fortunately, for our customers, web browsers immediately recognize compromised websites and block them. For us, this meant much time, effort and especially money cleaning my websites of malware, re-organizing my hosting to stop this from happening again, then contacting search engines such as Google to take us off their blacklist. What a pain. But I suppose it’s just the cost of doing business in 2016.
The Companies You Keep
Again, we thank our parters at Primary Foto Source (photos), Citi Centre Print (hockey cards) and Buzzy’s Jerzee City (sponsor plaques) for their large part in making our small business a success.
Also, if you ever find yourself in the same situation with hackers, may I heavily recommend MageFix.com. Amazing customer service and very patient with those of us who are less-than-sophisticated web administrators.
From all of us at PuckShots, which now consists of myself, Joanna, John, Gemma and Andrew; Merry Christmas and we’ll see you in 2017! 😀
