Grain Surfboards An environmentally friendly and socially responsible surfboard manufacturer

By: John MerrifieldInternet Marketing

So what makes them socially and environmentally responsible?

Grain surfboards saying is “locally grown and crafted by hand”. They state this because

there boards are made of wood instead of the normal surfboard, which is made of

fiberglass. They are created with quality and sustainability as they state on there website,

and are also designed to last forever so they will never end up in a landfill. Fiberglass

powder, which comes in large amounts when shaping a surfboard, can cause asthma like

symptoms or even lung cancer along with allergic reactions on the persons skin. Thus

using wood is a socially responsible alternative to fiberglass and using trees that are

grown to use for these projects instead of chopping down forests for supplies. In addition

to the use of wood, the shapers (people that make the board) at grain surfboards uses not

toxic resin as the waterproofing material and adhesive. They are also locally run by

surfers and privately owned.

Not only does grain surfboards make surfboards they also make hand planes,

body boards, skateboards, and apparel all with the same socially responsible and

environmentally friendly attitude.

Whats the market opportunity? (Foreign market Australia)

People often say that it takes one to know one and grain surfboards know surfers and

surfing. They are given this opportunity because they are owned by surfers, which gives

them the great opportunity of personally knowing there market without personally

knowing each customer. The market, age wise, will consist of surfers with a little bit

more money since the boards tend to be (a little bit more expensive) from the age range

of 18-60 equally split male and female, and they will tend to be very athletic and healthy

(surfing is a very healthy sport) We will only target the people in this age range on the

coastal united states from Rhode island down to Florida on the Atlantic side and from

Washington state down to California o the pacific side, there will also be people in

Hawaii that will be interested in our product. The foreign market we will be targeting is

coastal Australia because of its large surfing population especially around the Byron bay

area, because it is a huge surfing community. This will help us get a foothold in the

international market.

Revenue model ($)

Grain surfboards revenue model will be split between business – to - business (B2B) and

business to consumer (B2C). The business to business will consist of selling our

surfboards to surf shops along the coastal United States and Australia and having them

sell them to the customers.. This will consist of reps (representatives of the brand) going

to each shop and checking on inventories and having the shops place new orders, and will

also consist of holding contests that’s businesses will advertise at. We are also interested

in having companies that sell similar products to ours advertising on our website. The

business to consumer side of this will come from ecommerce, board sales from the

website, kit sales from the website, people coming to our shop, and workshops. Majority

of the revenue will come from sales to other shops and ecommerce.

Competitive environment

The sustainable surfboard market is very small with only a few companies doing the

same things that Grain is doing in response to sustainability, and when considering the

wide range of products that grain has no company even comes close to competing with

grain. Most companies make 1 or 2 models out of a sustainable environmentally friendly

material. LOST surfboards which is a huge name in the surfing industry makes a board

out of cork which is priced around 755.00$. A Company called MYCO foam makes there

foams out of mushrooms and has a wide range of surfboard size and shapes. Solo

surfboards which is a small company makes a wide variety of all natural wooden

surfboards of all shapes and sizes, and Earth Technologies (e-tech) which teamed up with

Channel islands which is an industry leader, to create an environmentally friendly

surfboard made out of recycled, all natural, and sustainable materials, with a wide range

of sizes and shapes they are a fierce competitor.

Competitive Advantage

Out of all the companies out there that create sustainable and socially responsible wooden

surfboards Grain surfboards has the widest variety with 19 different models each with

different sizes they have an arsenal of surfboards and kits they can send you to make the

boards yourself. These boards also span a wide range of different wave sizes and skill

level giving even the most inexperienced surfer the ability own, ride, and most

importantly have fun on a Grain surfboard. These different models also cover a wide

range of prices gaining in price as the size and density of the board rises. The prices range

from kits that start at 99$ too work shops that cost in the upwards of 2000$. They also

give you the option of a custom build for all of there boards that normally costs are 1000$

but also goes up with size. The cool interactive thing about Grain surfboards is they offer

classes where they show you how to make your own board out of wood these normally

cost around 1500$ + and take up to four days but none the less are a great way to build

personal relationships with your customers. When comparing the quality of grain

surfboards to other companies they are unparalleled, there years of experience and

expertise has given them a reputation for being the best in the business, but you end up

paying for the quality. There prices tend to be a little bit higher than the competition but

their customer interacting and service can’t be beaten. Overall Grain surfboards are

crafted by hand and come with great quality and experience and this is where the price

comes from.

Market Strategy

We have vast amount of eco friendly socially responsible products and services offered

that are all stated on our website ranging from board designs, custom builds, repairs,

workshops, customer service, blogs, reviews and FAQ’s We feel that we have a very

wide selection of boards ranging from big wave to fun size wave surfing so anyone of

any skill level can have a good time on a Grain product. All of our shapers come from an

experienced surfing woodworking, and shaping background making them more than

capable of answering any questions you might have about our products.

We want our customers to feel safe shopping online at our site so in order to do

this we have decided to pick a trusted payment processing service to make ecommerce

sales on our website, for this we will use Chase payment tech because of its fast secure

service with 24/7 customer support in order to make our customers feel more

comfortable. We also plan on giving people the ability to use their PayPal account in

order to give people a variety of payment options.

All of our orders will be received directly in the warehouse where the boards are

shaped and made, making for a fast turnover of getting the product to the customer. We

will also make sure we have enough employees and supplies on hand in order to fill all

orders in a timely fashion while keeping the quality that our customers love. After this we

plan on shipping all of our products via UPS with a money back guarantee especially if

any boards are received in an un satisfactory condition (with scratches, dents, or breaks).

This will give the customer peace of mind. We will also implement an email system

where the shapers can tell the consumer the stage of the process that there board is in

weather the resin is drying or its being packaged and shipped to let them know there

package is in transit.

We have planned to set our ecommerce budget at around 15,000$ because we are

a small company we feel that this is a sufficient amount of money to take care of what we

need done. Majority of this will go towards our banner ads, and pay per click advertising,

we feel that this will help the business the most. We plan on running our banner ads for 3

months and then be redesigned, and running our pay per click will be run for a short

period of time be evaluated and see if its working, then will be kept running or

redesigned. With all this we hope to raise our sales by 10-15% and increase our emailing

list by around 300 people.

Our proposed domain name is Http://www.GrainSurfboards.com we feel that the

current domain name is perfect because it is the name of our company with our best

product.

Website Optimization

Grain surfboards website as of right now is filled with the perfect amount of content they

have enticing pictures, great stories, prices, board pictures, the ability to log in, and a

search bar, they’ve done this in a creative manor but it feels cluttered. Its almost if they

focused too much on the creative aspect but not the organizational aspect of it all, there

over optimizing on the main page. In order to optimize all there content they should not

clutter there page in order to not bore on over stimulate the user too many pictures can do

this and that is what is going on within there website right now. The content should be

directed at the target market, the website should also provide a text that is easy to read on

the backdrop, on some of the pages on the site I had a hard time reading it because it was

white text on a very light blue background, in addition to this it should have a

professional and creative font that draws the viewers to read the text you have put on

your site. Videos and pictures can be added to show your product in action, which they

have done.

The content should not feel cluttered as I said above and unfortunately it has a

cluttered feel to it on there website right now there’s not enough white space. The logo

should be nicely placed on the top of your webpage so your viewers know that they have

clicked the right link. The content should also be very easy and fun to navigate as it is

currently. It should also be organized in a way where the consumer feels safe shopping on

or even viewing the webpage, it should have a pleasant feel to it.

Communication with your customers is a huge part of an effective website design

also the way you manage your content and the content you use communicates certain

things to your viewers as well. A list of frequently asked questions or FAQ’s is a great

way for viewers to find the solutions to common confusions that may occur with your

product or webpage in general. This along with a phone number, email, address, and live

chat and customer support are all good way to show your customer that you are always

there for them and ready to help. These things should all be organized in an easy to find

place such as at the bottom of every page or in an info tab within the website.

In order to make our site mobile friendly we have decided to decrease the number

of images and add more white space, we also decided to decrease out text to what was

most important. We added a search bar to make it easier to navigate the mobile site and

created a new domain for our mobile site using m.grainsurfbaords, instead of www. We

would still like for our mobile site to have a creative feel, and keep a solid flow and

movement to t without it being cluttered.

In order to give our page viewers the feel of personalization, and customization

we have given them the opportunity to make an account on our website where you can

sign in and set presets for the types of boards they would like to see and notifications if

prices fluctuate in any manner. We have also added interactive buttons that make it more

fun and very easy to navigate our website, and for certain pages that a very long we will

place a back to the top button that takes you to the top of the page and topic buttons at the

top that take you to a specific topic on the page. In addition to making a profile on our

website this will give you access to our blogs and review pages where customers new and

old can look at reviews of our products and discuss anything they would like. There will

also be links to our Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, And Pintrest pages at the bottom

of the home screen. This will give the consumers the ability to stay updated on what we

are doing here at Grain and stay connected with us while receiving special promotions.

We will also provide a share button on the bottom of our homepage allowing customers

to share the page with others.

The appearance of our site will be professional easy to read because of

professional but creative font type and easy to see colored font, along with being creative

all at the same time the use of interesting pictures and text will be integrated to give the

viewers an exciting, fun experience while viewing our products and learning about what

we do here at Grain as well.

Website Promotion

The look and feel of our webpage is very important but without it being promoted our

customers will never be able to find it, so we here at Grain have decided to organically

optimize our search engine placement. We are doing this by linking our website to

organic key word phrases such as Grain surfboards, wooden surfboards, natural surfboard

company, natural surfboards, Responsible surfboards, and organic waterman company.

This will make it much easier for our consumers to find and view our webpage. In

addition to this we will have good high quality content such as crisp clean HD images,

exciting text, and an interesting page that will draw attention to the page and often

encourage the viewer to share the page with his or her friends. In addition to this we will

have a solid HTML title tag such as Grain Surfboards – locally grown and crafted by

hand. And will keep the number of pages down in order to not confuse the search engine.

In order to see how our webpage is doing organically we will use certain metrics such as,

the amount of traffic the page gets in general, the conversion rate (the percentage of visits

that lead to a sale), what key words or phrases people searched to get to our site, the time

spent on each page, and bounce rate.

In order to promote our mobile website we planned on putting a link to our

mobile site on our site in an easy to see place saying “on the go visit us on your mobile

device at m.grainsurfboards.com” This will be the first step, we also plan on allowing

people to use their Facebook account to sign on to our mobile site giving them all the

benefits of making an account on our online site. We will also submit our site to

google.mobi and other mobile directories.

Our online promotion will be heavily based on social networking because we are

a small company and social networks are a free and easy way to reach a huge target

market espectially with everyone being online now a day. We plan on using Facebook,

Instagram, Twitter, Pintrest, and Tumblr to promote our company. On our social

networking pages we will give special promotions such as giveaways and contests. We

will measure the success of this by the amount of likes per picture the amount of

followers, and the amount of signons people do on our mobile site using their Facebook

account. We will also use YouTube to post videos of people using our products, how we

make the products, virtual tours of our shop and workshop, and review videos.

In order to promote our website further we have decided to use backlinks on all of

our social network pages, blogs, pictures, YouTube page, review pages, and websites that

sell our products such as the shops that we distributed our products to for them to sell.

We also plan on doing a monthly clean up of our backlinks making sure every single one

of them works leading to better search engine placement.

We would also like to use viral marketing in order to promote ourselves to mass

amounts of people this will involve us posting a humorous video of someone using one of

our products and say “share this to receive 20% off your online order” this will give

people the ability to save money and who doesn’t like saving money and will spread our

webpage and name all over social networks and the internet increasing sales and traffic.

We will measure the effectiveness of this campaign by measuring the amount of people

that use the 20% off coupon while shopping on our site, posting a post purchase quiz

asking how the customer found out about us, and checking the increase in followers

during the time that we run the campaign.

For our affiliate program we have decided to use LinkShare because they work

well with small to medium sized businesses. This will help direct traffic towards our site

for a small fee and percentage of sales; it will be extremely beneficial in the long run. We

will measure the effectiveness of the affiliate program by measuring the click through

rate, the conversion rate, and the amount of sales that come from the referral.

Banner ads and paid search is where majority of our advertising budget will be

allotted. With the help of LinkShare we will place banner ads on other sites that well

similar products as ours and place our banner ads on the websites of the shops that we

doe business with. All banner ads will be made in house to save money by one of our

board designers. Here is an example of a banner ad that we will run.

For the paid search option we have decided to use the pay per click paid ad words method

on search engines picking certain code words and phrases that will lead people to our site

on search engines, we will do this because it is relatively inexpensive when compared to

the other options. We will measure the strength of our banner ads and paid search with

the following metrics, we will measure the amount of banner ad clicks that lead to a sale

on our page, the click through rate which measure the amount of people who see your ad

and end up clicking on it, the conversion rate or the amount of people who clicked your

ad and it ended in a sale, and wasted spend the amount of money lost from the pay per

click.

We have also decided to create and in house emailing list for people that have

bought products from us before or people that have made an account on our site, we feel

that this is the best option because purchasing emailing lists can be expensive and this is

the best way to reach people that we know already enjoy and like our product. We plan

on sending out special promotions via email and will give people the option to join our

emailing list to gain the special offers. We also plan to send our viral marketing video

through email also. We will measure the effectiveness of the emailing campaign by The

click through rate of the email, the conversion rate, the bounce rate, amount of emails

shared, and the email list growth rate.