July turned out to be the worst sales month of 2025, outside of January when I was still getting the hang of in-house production and actively not promoting the website.
Go figure.
The silver lining is that I used the extra free time, not fulfilling orders, to collaborate with a cool cadet mom on a sticker innovation for this project – going from simply making stickers a bit smaller to creating “fun-size” stickers that can be purchased in 20-packs…
Here is the breakdown for July 2025, along with my takeaways.
Operations
4 new stickers dropped this month:
- Inspection Ready Expeditionary
- Meets Standards Morale Patch
- Mandatory Fun Dessert Tab
- Jeopardy Altimeter Check
plus 4 new sticker packs dropped this month:
Funny enough, figuring out how to optimize production on the 20-sticker fun packs probably took the most amount of time, and then I had to adapt and overcome a couple weeks of crippling procrastination when it came to getting everything up on the website.
But I persevered and here we are…
There are now 36 sticker designs on the website and 12 sticker pack options available for purchase, and I think that’s pretty cool.
Marketing
The Instagram account gained 132 new follows and had 66 unfollows – netting 66 new follows.
I made another four promos for three of the new sticker drops and the new Fun Size sticker packs – with the Jeopardy Altimeter Check promo getting the widest reach at 3,620 views.
Key Instagram Insight
Operation Air Force is an amazing summer program where groups of cadets going into their 2 degree year stay at an operational Air Force base and gain unsupervised access to a 12 or 15 passenger government van over a three week period of time.
Hijinks ensue and it’s one of my favorite things to make fun of on the account over the summer.
I’ve come to learn that it is seemingly a universal cadet experience to have some kind of a mishap with the van during Operation Air Force – not just something that happened to the group I was with at Langley AFB a couple decades ago…
That’s really funny to me.
And a remixed post of a clip from the Michele Mouton documentary making fun of this truth had 29,408 views, making it last month’s most popular post.
Website Traffic
Total web traffic was down 32% month over month (MoM) – likely explaining the drop in sales last month. Here’s a breakdown:
- Direct: 64 new users -46% MoM
- Organic Social: 59 new users -34% MoM
- Organic Search: 10 new users +11% MoM
I know that I need to spend some amount of time cultivating backlinks and messing with both Google Webmaster Tools and Google Merchant Center to start to beef up organic web traffic.
It’s on the to-do list.
Additionally, I will type out another self-flagellation for doing nothing this month to experiment with Meta ads or building out an Instagram Store.
Bad Chris…
Free Shipping
This month I did add a “free shipping” option for people spending over $20 on the site. A friend of mine was very adamant that people do not want to pay for shipping. Philosophically, I haven’t thought that the $1 flat rate shipping has been a huge turn-off to make or break a sale.
I like the $1 flat fee because it offsets the cost of one or two stamps and makes the product margins on stickers absolutely ridiculous, in the high 70s to high 80s.
But I’m open to being wrong about that.
So, I took a look at my lifetime order history and noticed that there was a definite cutoff at the $20 order value mark – with 70% of orders coming in under $20 over the life of this website.
That made it easy to pick $20 as the arbitrary order price to trigger the free shipping option, and I will monitor how it goes.
Revenue
TL;DR – Here are last month’s stats – and you can see a cumulative total each month on the About page, if you want because we’re building in public over here…
There’s no nice way to put it, this was an embarrassing showing for the month. The good news is that in the recent past sales picked up when I focused on product and product design.
So, I have high hopes for the new fun-size sticker packs reinvigorating monthly sales and know that I need to keep pushing out new designs.
If you’ve read this far, you’re a real one and I thank you for it. As always, feel free to slide into the DMs on Instagram to talk memes, business, marketing, design, or anything you want… and mention the monthly recap.
I am open to sharing what I’m learning and learning from others.
