Coming out of college I was shocked this didn’t exist yet. Now, I can understand why. When you think of what makes a good direct-to-consumer product its essentially the opposite of our tables. Small size, high cost, high margin.
Diewood was accelerating in 2021 but container costs going up 10x shrank our margins to nothing. While contemplating how to increase our margins, I had plenty of time to think.
I had heard of the blog post Climbing the Wrong Hill. After reading it I realized it was describing me. Having worked on 1 project for so many years my business ideas list had grown quite large, and some ideas I couldn’t stop thinking about. Now I’m taking my second shot down field. Stay tuned…
P.S. digital plans to make your own portable beer die table will be available here, but I won’t actively work on Diewood anymore.
I’ve decided to sunset Diewood.
It’s been a fun ride since I first started working on this in 2017. Since its launch in 2020 I was able to visit my manufacture in China, received a patent for my design, sold 180 tables making $36,000, and most important …
2020 has been a wild year. Picking up where we left off on the last Diewood update the new packaging for the 4’ wide tables has been working great! We haven’t had to refund any 4’ wide tables since implementing the new packaging shown at the red arrow above.
I had experimented with an ambassador program but didn’t have the time and resources to make it grow. We had about 5 people make the cut but Diewood wasn’t at a place yet where we could send them free products to push on their campus.
Instead I chose to focus on Facebook ads. We had been running them since we launched but never really figured them out. I’d get a sale here and there but it was burning more money than we were bringing in. November was approaching and I knew I needed a plan for Black Friday / Cyber Monday (BFCM).
Black Friday
The Facebook ads I was running weren’t as effective as they needed to be so I made the decision to put them on hold for the month of November. The only marketing we were going to do for BFCM was sending emails to my list of possible customers I had built up from an email form on the site. I put together a series of 3 emails to my list of a couple hundred subscribers.
BFCM email template I purchased
It did the trick. November was my best month since we launched and we finally pulled in double digit product sales for the month. It felt great not having to spend a dollar on ads.
I’ve never participated in Black Friday as a buyer and I was shocked how powerful it was for even a small company like Diewood. It seems everyone knows the drill, steep discounts + a sale that lasts a couple weeks longer than advertised.
Christmas
I decided to run this strategy back for Christmas using another email template I purchased. Worked like a charm again, beating our November numbers.
Christmas marketing email
It felt great closing the year on back to back best months but I was nervous sales would take a dive. But…we did have some big news up our sleeves to keep the excitement up.
2020+
Diewood partnered up with Dyeskins who makes custom vinyl prints that you can put on your beer die table. This proved to be a great partnership that led to a number of sales through marketing both products to each of our follower bases on Instagram.
Dyeskins and Diewood partnership
I also decided to get back into Facebook ads and learn everything I could to be more effective. And it worked out. As I’m writing this towards the end of February 2021 we have continued to increases sales month over month. The dive I was worried about hasn’t happened.
2020+ salesSaturday routine: fit as many tables in U-Haul as I can. Note 4’ tables are so large I can only fit 3 in a U-Haul van packaged.
And we just sold out of our 4’ wide tournament tables 🎉 These will not be missed as they weigh 95lbs each fully packaged. It’s a miracle I didn’t hurt my back manhandling these things myself 😬
Today (2/25/21) at UPS shipping last 4’ wide tournament table
Next step is to sell out majority of 2’ wides before making our next move this summer. Stay posted.
On January 10th, 2020, I got a message on Alibaba from my table top manufacturer regarding the legs they just received. It turned out 25% of the legs were malfunctioning due to an issue with a small spring inside them that wasn’t locking them in position. I had anticipated things would not go perfectly but I never thought the legs would be the issue. They were an off-the-shelf product unlike the custom table top and bags I had designed.
This issue was time sensitive since Chinese New Year was fast approaching and factories in China would be shutdown for 2+ weeks. The last container ship leaving China I could get the product on was scheduled for January 16th. It would take 1 day to inspect and pack the product and 1 day to deliver the container to the port, meaning we needed replacements in 4 days. After lots of back and forth messages with both my manufacturers trying to get the problem resolved I accepted reality. The time crunch was too short. The replacements would have to wait until after Chinese New Year was over and the factories opened back up on February 2nd. I had been working on Diewood for about 3 years at this point so what was waiting a couple more weeks I thought.
A few weeks had passed and something began picking up steam in the news. Coronavirus.
The virus ended up shutting down factories in China for months. What I thought was going to be a February launch soon started looking like a March, then April, maybe May launch?
Eventually the factories opened back up, the replacement legs were received, container packed and loaded onto a ship. The tables were finally on the water. It was great to be able to focus my energy during this time into Diewood instead of reading the news 24/7 as the world was falling apart.
The plan was for the container ship to arrive in the port of Oakland, the container would then go through customs, be loaded onto a truck (all handled by Flexport), and delivered to a 3PL center operated by EasyPost just south of the port in San Leandro. From there, the container would be unloaded, boxes would be stacked on shelves, and whenever I got an order on my Shopify store the facility would ship out a table.
Once the ship was on the water it was supposed to take around 21 days until it arrived at the port. So I decided to run through all my contacts at each company one more time to make sure my plan was going to work just fine. The communication with my EasyPost rep had been spotty for the past couple months and they were going to be a key part of my operation so I began reaching back out to them.
Not long after I was informed they had sold their San Leandro facility to another 3PL operator whom I’ve never heard of before.
My packages were supposedly going to be shipped to another warehouse they owned in the midwest. As this was my first shipment there was no way I was going to send them across the country where I couldn’t get to them if something went wrong.
While the tables were on the water I called an audible and began looking for another 3PL company close by. The best option would have been to send them to another company in LA. Again, too far, not going to happen. Unfortunately I lived in a small studio apartment in San Francisco that had no chance of storing the tables that filled up a 20’ shipping container. So I eventually found a self-storage facility close by the port and my apartment that I could travel to whenever an order came in. This plan would involve quite a bit more work on my part but was the best option I had.
With the new storage facility locked in and some movers hired for a day, I was ready to lay hands on my tables.
Having never unloaded a shipping container before I had no idea if this was going to work. There was no loading dock, no pallets or pallet jacks, just me, 2 movers, and a truck driver. Initially I thought I may be able to unload the container myself. Thankfully I was smart enough to not do this which would have been a big mistake (the tables weigh 35lbs and 75lbs each). With my storage unit loaded up, I took a couple tables home to inspect.
The tables looked and functioned great! The legs seemed to work fine and nothing was damaged. I was off to the races. At the end of April I drafted up an email to send to my email list and got my Instagram post and ad ready to go. On April 26th, 2020, after 3 years in the making we launched to the world. That first week I got 8 orders, half from family and friends and half from strangers. I had officially made money online.
Most things I had read online always said you should launch with 1 product but I disregarded this advice for a few reason.
The typical beer die player is used to playing on a 4’ wide table so to be more widely accepted I decided to get some of these made since the design was similar.
The 2 different price points would allow for more types of people to buy them.
I liked the 2’ wide more so I wasn’t going to launch without this option.
Luckily both the 2’ wide Backpacker Beer Die Table and the 4’ wide Tournament Beer Die Table were selling. Unfortunately though, the 4’ wide was getting damaged in shipment since it was twice as heavy and the thin layer of packaging from the manufacturer wasn’t durable enough to protect the table when going through the mail.
With this bad news I needed a solution fast. I paused all Instagram advertisements and focused all my energy on finding a solution. Eventually I found a packaging company in San Jose to developed new packaging to go around the existing box.
2” of foam around the entire perimeter plus a double-walled corrugated box was the solution. For each 4’ wide table I would need to package it in its new armor before shipping it out. At this point I was thankful the EasyPost 3PL didn’t work out because it would have been a mess trying to get the 4’ wide tables back to repackage.
After a month of packaging R&D I’m now back up and running. While the new packaging is not ideal it’s a solution that works and is required if I want to sell the 4’ wide tables.
All my energy is now focused on marketing and selling the tables. I’m beginning to experiment with channels outside of Instagram and in the coming weeks I’ll be setting up an Ambassador program targeted at college students. The goal will be to introduce them to Diewood so when they graduate and move to a big city apartment without a yard, they’ll be able to keep the beer die dream alive as well. Time to sell.
I left Friday from SFO for a 13 hour plane flight to China. From there I was supposed to connect on a local flight to our manufacturer’s city but missed it because connection was too tight. Tired from the long flight I booked a hotel next to the other airport in Shanghai since they were the only one that does direct flights to the city in the morning. Eventually I managed to find a cab or he found me wandering around looking like I needed him. Without much of a hesitation I jumped in knowing we’d be able to figure it out. Neither of us able to understand each other he spoke into his phone, passed it back to me, and it read aloud “where are you going?” I pressed his phone’s button and responded “Mercure Hotel Hingqiao Airport,” and it spit out something not even close. We continued to do this for 5 minutes while driving down the freeway trying different variations of questions and answers to no avail. Eventually he just asked for the hotel’s phone number so he could call them and figure out where they were, thankfully it worked. An hour later I was there, passed out immediately only to wake up at 4am sure to not miss the next flight.
Thankfully this flight was much shorter and before I knew it I was at the taxi line again. Luckily I had the directions to my next hotel in Chinese so we were good to go. That was until the ride finished and I tried to pay with a credit card that he would not accept (I later learned most Chinese people don’t use credit cards, they pay for everything by phone). He pointed me to Alipay which is an app he accepted payments on but after 10 minutes of downloading and trying to load my credit card we got the boot from the bellhop and told to resolve it inside. The ladies at the front desk took my $50 USD and turned it into RMB, freeing my driver to go. It was still early on Sunday and I had one goal, I forgot my dice in another bag at home so I had to buy some here. The ladies at the front desk directed me to a supermarket close by, it took me a while to realize it was underground just passed the McDonalds.
Sadly they didn’t sell packs of dice but an employee showed me to some kids games that had dice in them. Since each only had one inside I bought two just to be safe.
Ready to test out some wood I headed back to the hotel feeling accomplished. The next day our manufacturer picked me up and we drove an hour to their impressive facilities. They gave me the grand tour, checking out each building showing all the different things they can build. Having visited a number of manufacturing facilities before in the U.S. and Germany, this was equally impressive.
After some negotiating we were able to finalize the details of the order and had lunch on the rooftop. The first run of tables will be limited and if you’re interested in purchasing one, put your email in here to reserve your table. It was great getting the business out of the way on the first day which allowed me to relax and be a tourist for the rest of my trip.
I made my way back to Shanghai where I was staying at a hostel in the heart of downtown. It was Thanksgiving break back in the U.S. and the hostel was having Thanksgiving hotpot for the Americans traveling like me, a solid substitute for turkey.
Upon graduating college I took a forced hiatus from beer die. The reason? I lived in a city where nobody could afford a yard (a critical component of beer die). On the weekends many would hangout at parks in a college-like atmosphere but none were playing beer die. I realized the solution was a portable beer die table that could fit in the trunk of a car and be checked on airplanes. I spent 2 1/2 years refining the design before it was dialed. Now it’s almost ready. In the coming months I’ll be traveling to visit my manufacturing partner in China to review the products before they ship to the U.S. It’s been a long road to get to this point and I figured I’d take a moment and reflect on how I got here.
In the summer of 2017 I took up welding classes and not long after made my first table prototype. Turns out making a table out of steel makes it quite heavy. It wasn’t long after that I moved on to my next design, utilizing leg components from a folding plastic table and connecting them to a wooden table top. The folding plastic table was only 6′ long, trying to make it work for an 8′ long table wasn’t happening. Not quite sure where to go next with the design I decided to split the table up into components, first the table top, then the legs, then the bag. Instead of making the table top 4 pieces like my original design, I decided to separate it into thirds and make it fold up onto itself. After finding the right hinges I realized I was onto something and moved onto designing the legs. I needed something that was lightweight but sturdy and came up with the idea to use tent poles as the supports. It took me a bit to figure out the right configuration and then I stumbled onto the below design. It stood up but obviously wasn’t flat like it should be.
I worked through a series of aluminum slides inlayed in the bottom of the table to keep it flat but they would have broken after the first game of beer die. Back to the drawing board with the legs. Looking for inspiration I searched through the camping section on Alibaba and found what I thought was the perfect solution, both lightweight and portable. After negotiating with the manufacturer, I have them customize 10 samples to my desired dimension and received them a month later. We were in business.
Now it was onto the bag, a critical portability component. Taking the same approach that worked for the legs, I searched for a backpack like component that could carry large items. It took a while but I found one online, mocked-up the folded table top, and started taping away.
The design worked decently enough and I decided to get it made by a manufacturer overseas. I found one on Alibaba and sent them my design I sketched up in a PDF editor. Turned out they thought the wooden table top I drew was another pocket, not quite what I had in mind but after testing it out I realized it worked pretty well and was less confusing than the straps.
I simplified the design by making 2 pockets instead of 3 and got another sample made. This one worked great and I took the bag on its first flight.
In the meantime, my good friend Troy Taylor, made a kickass logo and the Diewood tree was born. The table worked! It could go on airplanes and you could play a real game of beer die on it. I had many friends help test it out and they liked it. It was good, but not great.
The table wasn’t too sturdy, if you leaned on it too much it would fall over. My goal the entire time with creating the table was to make a great product and I simply wasn’t there yet. I sat on the design for a bit, contemplating just pressing go on the order with my manufacturers but I knew I could make it better. Then, one morning in June of 2019, I woke up and had it. I knew what I had to do with the legs and soon found another manufacturer who produced some samples for exactly what I needed. During that same time I found a manufacturer for the table top and had what I thought was the final leg and table design.
I tested this out thoroughly with friends and everyone noticed the dramatic improvement. This was it. I decided to make a 4′ wide version as well that was not quite as portable but appealed to the wider beer die audience. This was a hit too.
With a couple modifications to the bags, I was there.
The Tournament Beer Die Table and Backpacker Beer Die Table designs are now complete and ready for production. In the coming months I’ll be traveling to China to see the tables get built and soon enough they’ll be ready for sale.
There will be a limited supply of tables on the first order but if you’re interested in buying one enter your email at diewood.com to be the first to know when we launch. And if you’re interested in hearing about my trip to China, subscribe here.
yo Joe Fitz 