What a year 2020 has been, and with some restrictions for us folk in Sydney looking like they're coming back, perhaps it's STILL not over yet.
Despite the challenges of COVID-19 and everything that it has led to with doing business in Australia, this year has been super eventful in its most positive sense.
Growing Pains
One thing that we've learnt from our years in automotive is that motor enthusiasts will ALWAYS have money for their rides. Yes, this year had COVID-19, but once the uncertainty subsided there were enthusiasts earning income, without holidays to go on, nights out to enjoy or any luxuries that involved crowds.
What did this mean? It meant that we had significant growth when it came to the number of orders and overall sales numbers that were unprecedented for our business in 2020.
With any big growth spurt, comes the growing pains. Pre-orders accounted for a HUGE portion of our customer purchases, and while we tried our best to accomodate friendly shipping timeframes, COVID-19 and the port strikes in the latter half of the year disrupted a lot of ETAs.
We appreciate our customers' trust in spending with us, and in 2021 a big goal for the business is to smoothen out communications for pre-orders, and find solutions for long ETAs.
Additions to the Team
We've onboarded a number of new staff this year, but the most notable member that many have provided feedback with has been Mr. Content, Peter.
Also known as @fmzvisuals, he's been responsible for almost everything visual that has come out of the Carbonetics brand over the last three quarters of 2020.
Photo, video and graphic design has been briefed for Peter and as through this we have seen so much positive feedback from our fans and customers who appreciate our attention to showcasing the best that incorporate our brand.
There is so much more we will be doing content-side next year, Peter and the team are excited to share this journey.
Blog
In line with the new direction and quantity of content we've been able to produce, we wanted to tell the stories of the builds that have invested into our products. We remember last year at HIN we counted just over fifty vehicles that had our products, and it was only those that we knew of.
With so many vehicles, we knew that there were bound to be great recollections, tales of inspiration and motivations for building cars for different purposes, be it for show, street or motorsport.
We've had good consistency with the blogs, one of the limiting factors so far is that most of them have been Sydney-based, but we're looking forward to documenting builds from outside our home city next year!
Events
The Carbonetics team had grand plans for the shows that were scheduled for this year. There was a roadmap for WTAC, HIN and the other major shows, but once COVID got serious we decided against preparations for anything new, despite the easing of restrictions.
For us, it was important to create an environment for our customers and fans to feel safe and be able to openly chat about their passions, which is why we collaborated with Luddenham Raceway to begin the first couple trials of our Carbon & Caffeine event. It was invite-only, and the aim was simple: to start the weekend early with our pride and joys, catch up and create an event without major disruptions to the day.
Next year we intend on growing this and including more customers, keep an eye out for this, AND something special for the big events making a return...
We would love to continue on and talk about all the big things that we experienced in 2020 but this blog would go on for days...
As the last blog for this year, we want to thank all our customers and fans who have supported us this year.
We've made plenty of moves, some awesome and some that we prefer to forget, but one thing that we'll NEVER forget are the people who always have our back.
Carbonetics will continue to innovate, improve and provide the solutions for car enthusiasts in 2021, we look forward to this journey with you!
