The Year Past, and the Year to Come

This has been a busy year at Heimerdinger's. You might have noticed that we started carrying some new products, but there's also been a lot more than that going on.


On the home front, Carl and his daughter redesigned part of our sales display area, to better display our expanding line of men's shaving supply, which has continued to grow.
We have also just completed a re-arrangement of some of our grinding shop and storage area, to make room for our shipping department to expand, and to make our grinding shop more efficient. Although invisible to you the customer, you should be starting to enjoy the fruits of this organizational effort! We also have a new employee working in the shop, who is some odd sort of cousin. I'll have to see if people will let me do a who's who blog post. That'd be fun.

This was also a year for networking. Carl and Glenna went to the NHMA Housewares show in Chicago. They also hooked-up with the Embroiders Guild at their annual convention, which was held in Louisville this past year.

In 2008 we really kick started our newsletter and this blog. (Ok, technically I was working on this some in December of 2007, but mostly it was this past year.)

But the really big news (the biggest news, in fact) is our new Point-of-Sale system that we started at the beginning of December. Ladies and Gentlemen, we can now use barcodes. Oh, this might not seem like a big step, but it has helped in many ways. For those of you who visit us in store, it should make check-out faster since we don't have to write out receipts by hand. For those of you who only see us online, we're working to incorporate the system to the website, so that inventory is kept up to date. That means no more waiting for items that we have to backorder.
The system isn't perfect yet. I don't think every product we have has been barcoded yet, but progress is steady. There were a couple months of concerted data entry by a couple of our newer (and more computer savvy) employees to get this going.


The year 2009 should also be a busy one for us. It's inventory season, and you can bet I'm glad I won't be in Louisville to count paring knives. As the year progresses, we'll be working on the website some, as we always do.

Another thing of interest is that the Kifemakers Guild is having their annual show in Louisville, on Sept 17th - 20th, 2009. These folks make knives from scratch, and their items must pass a battery of tests before the individual can be voted into the Guild. I'll be posting more on this later as info becomes available, but you can rest assured that my uncle and grandfather will be attending.


Well, that's all I can think of right now. I'm sure Uncle Carl will has a lot more that I've left off, but those're the highlights.

Happy New Year, folks!