My very own State of the State Address for 2008

It’s been an interesting year for selling cribbage and chess boards (and now plastic drilling templates as well). There were many firsts for me this year. 2009 will mark my 3rd year of selling cribbage and chess boards.

I sold my first Tournament Size Chess boards this past year.

I sold a Cribbage board for over a $100. Granted, this was a personally significant board, but still…for a guy who started selling boards for $3, this was a personal milestone. This board sold on esty.com, by the way. If you have handmade wares to sell, etsy.com is the way to go.

I stopped using my metal templates to drill with and now I drill boards with the plastic template clones (just like the ones I sell). There are a couple of reasons I did this. One, it’s a lot easier to drill a board with an 8 ounce plastic template mounted on it, instead of a 3 pound rolled steel metal template. It cuts down on tear-out on the board since I can get the template really tight against the board. And since I’m using clear plastic, I can position the template somewhat in case the board pattern/wood grain pattern nicely compliment each other.

I sold 33 plastic drilling templates in just 6 months. I now sell 12 different styles of cribbage board templates, done in various kinds of plastic (chemcast, poly-carbonate, and the blue plastic backed kind). Hopefully, I will increase the number of templates I sell to 19 different types in 2009.

My website started showing up on the first page of Google/Yahoo/MSN search results, when searched on the words, “Cribbage board(s)”. It doesn’t consistently show up on the first page – it’s more of an intermittent thing.

The number of unique (new) visitors per day to my website finally got out of the single digit range. In the month of December, I saw 30-50 unique (new) visitors to the website per day.

I started selling cribbage and chess boards on etsy.com with some success. I abandoned my first etsy handle (“19pointhand”) and went back to the more familiar "enumerocribbageboard". I would have added an “s”, but etsy.com has a 20 character limit on names.

I learned that people really, really like the 3 player continuous track style board and I will be making a lot more boards in that style (just a soon as I finish drilling the 80+ tournament style boards), I have the queue right now.

I’m finally started to feel (after completing about 200 boards) that my self-imposed apprenticeship in board making is coming to an end. I’m looking forward to taking what I’ve learned thus far and carrying it forward.