Goat Weathervane

Yesterday was fun and busy, and the weathervane questions were flying in on the phone, so I will take a minute and share one of my favorites.

Custom Weathervane Request for a Dutch Landrace Goat weathervane of a goat named Spunky from a customer in Colorado.

We do not do a lot of custom request here at the Weathervane Factory because we just do not have enough hours in the day. We are a small copper weathervane company and most of our weathervane designs we do with molding. We make our own weathervane artwork designs which takes a lot of time and effort to accomplish. Once the artwork molding is completed, we can then make a lot of the same weathervane using the new molds while, listing the new weathervanes for sale at reasonable pricing.

Because of this process, we would hate to charge the first customer with a request an extreme amount of money then the second customer much less. We are using a 50 over 5 years plan with new designs. We break down the cost of the labor and new mold and share out the cost to 50 customers with the plan to attempt to hopefully sell 50 of this particular weathervane over 5 years, this way the first customer does not have to cough up the entire cost of the labor, artwork and molding of the first weathervane. If for some reason the new weathervane sells more than 50 weathervanes over five years, than it can help offset the cost of the odd sellers such as the Haddock Weathervane or other unique weathervanes we did for fun but may not be the most popular.

So how do we decide which weathervane designs to do, well this is simple, customers call, email – harass us on Facebook, maybe they are looking for a pug weathervane, or some other design that is important to them. We attempt to keep track of the popular request, but we have such a large number we never know for sure if the one that we decide to do is going to be a hit.

I use the pug weathervane as an example for fun since we have already completed the pug weathervane, the issue with dog weathervanes are that every persons pet dog looks different and dogs tend to be extremely difficult to capture in a dog weathervane design. Last summer at our retail shop in Trenton, I had a customer tell me that my pug weathervane was too fat and if I can make it thinner for him would think about buying it. This particular potential pug customer, who was none to friendly to me, and made it very clear that pugs were not fat or chunky was not going to purchase a fat pug weathervane. Well I was flabbergasted, not only was I very proud of my new chunky pug weathervane, I was shocked that this critique even would come up because if you are not a fan of something, well you are not required to purchase. Lucky for me, other customers have been showing my porky pug some love and our pug puppies are finding homes quickly enough.

So back to the designs, well we are not doing a goat named Spunky anytime soon, “sorry Spunky,” but we love to hear from our customers. At present, we are waiting on our small beagle weathervane molding to be completed and we also have another rooster weathervane that should be done soon enough.

So hopefully I have helped answer a bit on custom request but feel free to keep calling, emailing and following us on Facebook – we do pick some of our customers request for our new designs.