Field of Dreams

My father was not a late adopter. He was building websites in the iMac era, which was early by any reasonable measure. The company had a web presence before most of its competitors did, and he knew it mattered. I want to be clear about that before I say the next part.

Here is what actually happened. He would build a website, then go do a show, then come back and work on the website some more. Craft fairs. Wholesale trade shows. That was the channel he knew, and it worked, so he kept going back to it. The website would sit there between shows, waiting for traffic that was not going to arrive on its own.

A friend's father ran a company in the same category. Somewhere in those same years, he figured out internet marketing. He ran it like a business, not like a brochure. That company is still around. It has more market share than American Hat Makers does, and it earned that position the right way, which is the part that is hardest to argue with.

My dad's version of it, in his own words: for twenty-five years they built many many websites and never did any internet marketing, not one dollar's worth. That is a direct quote and I have heard him say it more than once, always the same way, no bitterness in it, just a fact he had to sit with long enough to get honest about.

The frame he uses is the field of dreams. Build it and they will come. He built the website but did not do the part where you make sure people actually show up, and his competitor did not have that problem. That is the whole of it.

American Hat Makers has been making hats for more than fifty years. We have made over a million hats. We have more than 16,000 five-star reviews from people who found us eventually, and that word eventually is one I come back to. It has a dollar figure attached to it that I cannot calculate exactly but can feel clearly enough.

The business is in a different place now. Online is working. Wholesale is steady. My father does not do shows anymore. He designs, and I handle the rest of it, which is a division of labor that took a while to land on and that I do not take for granted.

What I keep coming back to is that it was not ignorance. He knew what the internet was. He knew it was the future. He kept going to shows anyway, because that was the thing he was good at and the thing that was paying the bills when the bills had to get paid. I understand that logic. I am not sure I would have done it differently in his position.

I still do not know what the right answer is when the thing you are doing is working and the thing you are not doing might work better. You find out a long time later.