R.H. Lindsay Company has evolved into a much younger Fourth Generation operation in the past year or so since Grace Lindsay-Parks started working here. Phil had long cultivated an old grumpy Yankee image which wasn’t the best approach for many of our customers. Luckily our prices and supply sources helped carry us through.
One thing Phil was doing before Grace started was maintaining a company facebook page with the reward of a short sale for every 100 fans we’d sign up. This week we went past 2900 fans which is remarkable to us. We also have an Instagram account that Grace provides most of the content. Phil still provides a boring warehouse shot now and again.
Adjusting to Grace working at R.H. Lindsay has been a delight. The first time someone called who could care less who I was while asking excitedly for Grace hurt the old ego a little bit. Given how I would be a gruff and grumpy contact it didn’t take me long to realize, ego be damned get your best person our front! Now Grace carries most of the ball when it comes to our marketing and social outreach.
We said we’d keep it on facebook but to save you a couple of clicks, note 2900fbsale is the coupon code for 2.9% off your online order through Monday, December 14th. This is a Phil generated action and we hope some of you find it to be a good opportunity at this time of year to build value in your inventory while we get to ship more wool in December.
Otherwise we’ll look forward to a lot of the tasks we set Grace on with her youthful exuberance. We may finally be scaling the “wholesale account” mountain so if you’re a small creator make sure you’re set up with Uncle Sam so you can get the wholesale discount.
We’re already carrying two dyed lines that we’ve added since Grace started here. One was a deliberate thought out action on our side and the other was a sort of dumb luck just happened to be in the right spot deal. Now with the local dye house having been wiped out in the carnage of Hurricane Ida in the Mid Atlantic you’re due to see a transition of color and wool sourcing in that color range. There are a lot of moving parts and possible outcomes and we’ll be sure to continue trying to supply the more popular colors over time. The other line of imported Corriedale will be expanded with an eye toward filling in colors from the New Zealand Romney line that we’ll be figuring out how to continue as we head into 2022. Who knows, if we get lucky there won’t be any significant change to that line unless its improvements.
Phil’s gotten lazy on the marketing front as Grace’s efforts have helped us grow our base of customers. That said, we’ll try to inject Phil back into the marketing a bit here on the site blog as well as on facebook. For years we published a weekly news letter so it is in that vain we hope to get us writing about what is going on and what we see in the American wool craft and niche textile marketplace. It’s a fun and challenging place to be after a career of seeing the use of wool threatened and the production decline sharply. Despite the hard challenges of closing dye houses and supply disruptions there is a hopeful outlook in the wool and sheep side of the business. Grace’s enthusiasm has certainly helped. Hopefully Phil’s recent complacency will wear off and we’ll become a wool marketing duo with a wide range of experience and expertise that go toward helping small producers find fair priced industrial products for their businesses. After all the R.H. Lindsay Company story is an enduring and American story for sure. One we hope we’ll continue to write and tell for years to come.