Henry Krank & Co
Introduction
Situated in Pudsey, Henry Krank & Co have been supplying the shooting trade in the UK for over 40 years now, and continues to be a curious attraction for both shooters and interested passersby to this day. The company however wasn’t always known under the now well recognised moniker “Henry Krank”, the business was previously owned by a one Mr. John Longstaff, who’s suspicious death (widely assumed to be a murder by higher foreign powers) is still unsolved even today - although credible rumours swirl both inside and out of the building.
I’ve lived in Pudsey all of my life, and the company was always a well known oddity even when I was a kid. In fact, I’d visited when I was young a few times to ogle the myriad rifles and armour on display on the shop floor, much to the chagrin of staff at the time I’m sure. By chance, a close friend of mine secured a job there while I was studying at university, and would regale to me the many stories told to him about the history of the business and its past and present owners when he visited me in Sheffield. Considering Pudsey’s main claim to fame is a bandanna wearing bear, and is congested with many charity shops, hairdressers, and bookies, these tales made for a surprising but welcome contrast.
Upon completing my university course and moving back up to Pudsey, the job hunt began in earnest. After many promising but ultimately failed applications it became apparent to me that perhaps the current job market in my area for fresh graduates wasn’t exactly booming, to say the least. An olive branch in the form of a part-time job opening as a website assistant was offered to me, which I gladly interviewed for and was fortunately successful in securing. What was supposed to only be a temporary thing soon became a full-time position, and over the years my role evolved hugely as the business continued to evolve in the digital space. Continue reading to see a detailed breakdown of the kinds of projects, duties, and tasks I’ve been involved with during my time at the company.
Website Administration & Customer Support
When I first started at the company, my initial task was to clean up and reformat the data that hadn’t migrated to the then new Magento website properly. There were many issues with the migration that needed to be promptly addressed, such as fixing all broken HTML & CSS elements, adding new products and information to the website, updating existing products and blog posts, and ensuring formatting is consistent on the website across different devices for a more unified user experience.
After this had been completed, the focus in this area on a day-to-day basis shifted to performing more regular administrative and upkeeping tasks in the Magento administration backend, as well as troubleshooting various issues that may arise both with regards to our website and customer enquiries over phone and email. Customer requests usually pertained to account difficulties, site bug/issue reports, and requests for clarification regarding certain information provided on the website.
A major win for me early on was the resolution of certain long-standing issues that I was able to successfully troubleshoot and fix. One such issue was that stock reminder emails had never worked as the then marketing manager informed me, obviously this posed a massive issue when we got new shipments in as customers often had no idea unless they happened to visit our site and notice the new stock for themselves. After tracing various site logs and doing some testing of my own, I was able to provide enough information to our site hosting platform and our external system support technicians which led to not only the issue being rectified, but also an immediate jump in revenue due to customers now being made aware of wishlisted items being back in stock.
In 2022, we migrated to a brand new Magento 2 website. This was an enormous undertaking and one I had a major role in for all stages of development, from initial planning to eventual implementation and launch. I was designated the main point of contact from the start for our web developers, as a result of this, I was responsible for monitoring progress on various tasks and projects that made up the greater scope of work when creating and implementing the new website. This included creating iterative mock-ups and drafting feature requests to then work with the developers to implement, daily liaising with the developers of our internal customised EPOS system and the web developers in order to coordinate the implementation and testing of proposed new features and functionality as well as data migration, and extensively testing completed development work such as responsiveness and functionality testing and then reporting/logging any errors or changes that needed to be addressed, ensuring reported issues are actioned to company standards.
I was also responsible for all hands-on testing and reporting of post-launch issues as they arose, these could be anything from broken webpages to incorrectly formatted elements at certain screen sizes. This testing was extensive and identified many things that could only realistically have come to light during regular site operation as opposed to the more controlled testing environment we had before launch. Another aspect of work with regards to the new website was laying the groundwork for new features that we’ve yet to fully implement or put live, such as click and collect (and a few other secret features yet to launch). If you’re interested in further details and a much more detailed breakdown of this project, follow this link.
After the migration to our new Magento 2 website was complete, tasks in this area evolved and sometimes became more involved due to new features and internal systems we’d implemented to coincide with the new site launch. This implementation of new site features, such as a more dynamic related products area, and the migration of certain data that required a more hands on approach, meant that work constantly evolves. If we couple that with the growing list of further site changes we have planned throughout this year and the next, it is a good indicator that there are no laurels to rest on as we continue to push the capabilities of not only the website, but the business in general, in our ever evolving digital world.
Marketing
Working alongside the initial marketing manager guaranteed continued exposure to the more public-facing aspects of the business, ensuring that my time was split not just between internal administrative and troubleshooting tasks, but also aiding with materials and processes that elevated our presence and reach within the shooting community.
A major component of this was to assist with the creation of various website elements, alterations, and custom pages in HTMl & CSS sometimes using graphics supplied by the marketing manager. These changes and additions could either be due to a desire to update the homepage slightly for a newer look, or to coincide with a certain holiday or event (Christmas, Black Friday, etc). Interactive mock-ups were also created in preparation for large-scale homepage overhauls, although such redesigns ended up coming in at a later date when work began on an entirely new website.
Eventually, in an effort to expand and streamline our marketing reach even further, we migrated from our admittedly clunky and no longer fit for purpose email marketing system to an all new solution. After much deliberation we decided on utilising Active Campaign as our new email marketing solutions platform. I was responsible for all the research and eventual implementation for this new system, ensuring that we had automations, tagging systems, and form data in place to grow our subscriber base far beyond what we previously had, and making sure that campaigns were as targeted as possible in order to cut down on unsubscribe rates. I also utilised Zapier in order to properly integrate with our Magento 1 environment, this allowed for the configuration of more complex customer rules. I have also aided in the creation of the various marketing campaigns we send from the platform, providing copy and suggestions before the sending of the final campaign.
Active Campaign is now an absolutely integral part of the marketing strategy at Henry Krank & Co, so I’m glad I had the opportunity to be an instrumental part in it’s setup and configuration, while we may not have the largest subscriber base when compared with other retail companies, our unsubscribe rate is low due to the efforts put in early in the implementation stage and the continuous work performed on the system.
Duties in this area became more involved upon the departure of the marketing manager, meaning I was to take a more active role in the company’s marketing efforts. One such task was the creation of the trade price list we use to keep our trade customers informed of price updates (as our website currently only displayed prices inclusive of VAT). The trade price list had to be easy to update via bulk data export from our customised EPOS system, but also visually pleasing and easy to read. This document is distributed via marketing campaigns targeting our trade customer list only, and is regularly updated with new prices and theming to match our broader branding strategies.
With the move to our new website, our blog migrated to Wordpress. This opened up new avenues for us as Wordpress blogs are highly extensible through the use of various plug-ins. This made SEO a priority as we now had a much more visual and live way of measuring our performance in this area. As a result of this, many blogs had to be re-written or amended in order to meet current SEO standards. I was tasked with making sure our blogs were fit for purpose and updated, utilising additional tools such as ahrefs in order to fix unoptimised images and broken links.
More recently, I have been heavily involved with the planning and creation of a new logo for the company. While the current Henry Krank logo is well known and instantly recognisable to those in the shooting trade, we felt that it doesn’t currently fit in with our newer, more modern branding present both on our website and our marketing campaigns. While still in the early planning stages, progress has been good with the mock-ups I have created in house and it is our hope that progress moves swiftly so that we may finally upgrade our branding, certainly this will be no mean feat as the current Henry Krank logo has been in use for 40 years.
As an aside, when considering informational materials, it can be easy to only consider the public facing aspects of this, usually for the benefit of customers. However, internal documentation and materials must also be created for staff and be presented in a similarly easy to digest manner. Keeping an up-to-date knowledge base and clear training manuals for staff both old and new is a vital aspect of keeping everyone on the same page regarding business changes and procedures. Materials I have created in aid of this included training courses for Excel, documentation on how to operate new systems (such as our new gift voucher redemption procedures), and work from home policies during the Covid-19 pandemic. As a continually evolving business, company procedures and systems are prone to frequent change. This has a knock-on effect on the internal documentation also needing to be continually tweaked and updated to ensure no out of date information remains. This is something that was especially important in this place of work due to the nature of the items we not only sold, but handled on a daily basis.
IT Administration
With my educational background being in IT & Networks, I quickly found myself also looking after the on-premises IT equipment and systems. Providing support not only for staff for the internal systems, but also for customers when issues arose with our website.
As a result of this, I was responsible for purchasing decisions regarding all IT equipment in the building, which includes assessing the needs of employees and then ensuring such needs are met by determining and then acquiring the correct equipment. A major project that pertained to this was spearheading the total overhaul of all computer systems on-premises in accordance with employee and business needs, from initial research through to final purchasing and then configuration and installation of any and all devices and workstations. Which of course included the eventual troubleshooting of issues as they arose.
The most recent large-scale project regarding the computer systems and network was the extensive troubleshooting, replacement, and monitoring of various components of the internal network. The need for this arose as we were starting to have frequent network outages at seemingly random times for no apparent reason. Frequent communications with our service provider isolated the issue firmly within our building as opposed to being any fault with any external lines. The building in which Henry Krank & Co is situated in is fairly old, with tangled cables running like prominent veins throughout the building, many of which have been obsolete for decades with nobody actually knowing where one cable starts and another ends.
The first step in this was to trace every cable in the building from its start point to the end point, this allowed me to identify the cables that were no longer needed, and label up the ones that were. Any cables that couldn’t be traced visually were identified by the use of a cable tester to see which output transmitted the signal. After every cable was identified and tested for faults, work began on replacing certain network devices such as any old switches that were suspected to be causing bottlenecks. Old patch cables were replaced with newer CAT6a ones for good measure too, in an attempt to upgrade as much of the network as possible without having to resort to ripping any cables out which ran through walls and ceilings.
This role has also included, but is absolutely not limited to, ensuring all company data is backed up in multiple locations in the event of a disaster, coordinating with support teams in help troubleshoot and fix issues with our VOIP phone system and company internet connection, and providing custom materials to web developers in order to update our email themes (including exact templates created in HTML & CSS to remove any ambiguity).
While the main issues in the building have now been fixed (touch wood), regular maintenance tasks and support requests still arise on a weekly basis, and there’s seemingly always a printer in the building that isn’t working properly.
Additional Notes
While certainly lengthy, the information above is not at all exhaustive and only seeks to provide a more detailed glimpse into my time at the company. It does seem that every member of the team at Henry Krank manages to get involved with multiple areas and projects during their time here, so it’s not at all surprising that the tasks I’ve performed and the projects I’ve been a part of have been varied. I’ve not even mentioned all the work I completed in researching and implementing postage/carrier changes for the business, as well as the work undertaken for projects that are not yet public.
If you have any questions regarding the content of this article, or anything else you may find on this site, please contact me at maxingham@duck.com.