As part of our small business owner series, we spoke with Ficks Music to learn more about their online sheet music store and how they differentiate themselves from other vendors. Among other things, Ficks Music uses a rubber logo stamp on every package that is shipped out to customers. Naturally, we became immediate fans here at Stampmore and thought we'd ask more of the Ficks Music story.
What's Ficks Music all about and how did it start?
Ficks Music began out of my frustration at finding high-quality classical sheet music. It’s admittedly a niche market! Like many other long-tail verticals, the brick-and-mortar businesses have not successfully gone online and the volume is too small for Amazon to care about. To me, it meant I could remain frustrated or there was an opportunity to create a business!
What were some of the challenges early on in branding / customer recognition?
Professional musicians buy sheet music consistently, so generating repeat customers was (and still is!) an important goal. Besides a great products and fast shipping, I wanted to make sure the “unboxing” experience was memorable and customers would think of us the next time they needed music.
Without the budget or sales volume to justify custom packaging, I had to find crafty ways to put our logo in front of customers as many times in the buying process as possible. I did everything from printing the logo on the shipping label to adding inserts into the books — just so customers would see our brand one last time before playing the music.
What are some of the things that have worked for you from a branding perspective?
One of the best decisions I made was to use a text-only logo (in our case the font Trajan Pro). This not only saved a ton of money on logo design, but makes creating letterhead and anything printed super easy since you can just type the logo!
(Ficks Music's rubber stamp and inventory)
We also brand (with a rubber stamp) each of our outgoing packages. Like many companies, we sell on Amazon and they strictly prohibit you from marketing to their customers. However, if your standard packaging contains your logo, it’s completely fine! We’ve seen customers buy from us on Amazon and then a few months later go directly to our site.
Tell us about your rubber stamp!
We have a great versatile rubber logo stamp. It’s about 5” wide and really stands out when a customer opens their package. In fact, a few customers have told us that our packaging is the best in the industry! We think they might be exaggerating. :)
(Ficks Music's custom rubber stamp and InkPad)