2025 is Officially Started – 2024 is Thankfully in Its Grave, Decomposing

We’ve had a great start this year with lots of orders, yet another revamp of the website, and a renewed effort to reach a wider audience via the ever-present Internet.

Ironically, though, that’s exactly why I haven’t been able to blog—working on the ehrm web and social media has consumed all my time.

Sipping my coffee and pondering my choices, I decided to dedicate this chapter of the blog to a glimpse of our plans for the year, still in its infancy. But first, let me tell you the real story of what happened during the annus horribilis (2024, that is):

Already in December 2023, we started preparing for the move to new premises near Skellefteå. We built up plenty of stock, filling our shelves with products at all stages of production. Furthermore, a specialized moving company was contracted to handle everything, and the new premises were being rebuilt to suit our needs—repeatedly inspected for progress.

On March 15th, we started unplugging everything and loading a truck, aiming to move it all in one go.

This turned out to be enormously wrong.

To make a long story short, our hope of restarting electrolysis and machinery within a month kept slipping further and further. By the last days of June, we finally managed to produce our first diamond whetstones in the new place. The only problem? The quality sucked!

It turned out to be a mix of chemical contamination and the need to adjust our process for the new electroplating bath. Since we had completely rebuilt the production line as part of the move (I mean, why not…), we had to troubleshoot and adapt. Long story short, we got back to stable production in September—and boy, were we in a hurry to make up for lost time!

I thought I was being realistic when I told my colleagues we’d have at least a one-month production stop after everything was in place. That turned out to be the biggest mistake in any project plan I’ve ever made. We were almost five months late compared to my estimate, and we only made it thanks to the enormous stockpile we had prepared before moving.

That said, I’m really pleased with the outcome. As the saying goes (at least in Sweden): It’s a good thing you don’t know what you’re getting into—otherwise, you’d never do it at all…

The end result, though, is fantastic! We’re now producing faster and with better quality than ever. We have a much nicer work environment and, more importantly, room to expand—which we’ll hopefully need to start thinking about soon. 🙂

Already in January, I made a major effort to merge our two websites (English and Swedish, with similar content) into one English site with a Swedish translation. It took me about a month to complete. The result? OK, but not really an improvement.

The goal was to reduce future workload, and yes, it did that. But at the same time, the page became painfully slow.

To be fair, it wasn’t very fast to begin with, but after adding translation and some other features, I started doubting the entire setup. To make matters worse, I was in contact with an ad agency to help drive more visitors. They straight-up told me it wasn’t worth it because the website was too slow and—gasp!—too ugly!

Alright, alright… I thought. I hired professional help to rebuild and update the site to modern standards. The plan was to launch the new homepage and e-shop by the end of May.

May came… and we were nowhere near ready.

I chased the consultant with a verbal flamethrower, which did increase his activity, but still, we didn’t go live until the end of June!

At this point, I figured I’d better stick around during vacation to handle the flood of orders that would surely come pouring in, right?

Wrong.

The new site didn’t sell at all. We had two conversions during the entire month of July. I was seriously wondering if this was the beginning of the end for my company.

I kept working on the wretched thing but couldn’t make it perform as expected. After some serious scrutiny, the web consultant and I concluded that the best way forward was to redo everything—again—on a fresh WordPress/WooCommerce installation with a new, faster web host.

Finally, on January 2nd, 2025, the website you’re reading this on went live—and it feels great!

Of course, a website is never truly finished, and there’s always something to improve, but at least it works and is fast. I’m so happy! 🙂

The plan is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy! In one sentence:

“We will focus on releasing new world-class products and marketing them professionally!”

This is no small undertaking for a micro-company in northern Sweden, in the middle of nowhere… but I’m confident we’ll make it happen.

We’re already very good at sharpening-related products, and we have a pipeline of approved products ready to launch—so that’s actually the easy part.

The hard part is learning how to market these products effectively. This is something I’ve been working on for a long time. Now, I spend about 50% of my workdays creating content, buying ads, scouting good influencers for affiliate partnerships, chatting with them, sending out review samples… you get the idea. I’m learning, getting faster, and—thankfully—starting to enjoy the process.

Meanwhile, we’re also innovating—exploring new ways to tweak our manufacturing process, improve electroplating, and create new fixtures. This suddenly opens doors to even cooler products!

So, in parallel with marketing, I still need to dedicate the remaining 50% of my time to classic product development. Our goal is to market exceptional products—not just good ones.

The tricky part? It’s not always clear which products will actually sell versus which ones will just get a thumbs-up but generate no revenue. The solution? Even more product development, so we can handpick the best ones to release and market whenever we feel the time is right.

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That’s it for now—2025 is off to a strong start, and I can’t wait to see where we go from here! 🚀