Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast from Geocaching HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan aka Rock Chalk, one of the staff here at HQ. On this episode we hear from Mark Anderson, whose geocaching username is markstafari. Mark is a long time HQ staffer who works at the Shop Geocaching warehouse here in Seattle. It is just a couple miles away from the main Geocaching HQ office. If you have ever ordered something from Shop Geocaching, then Mark and/or his colleagues were the ones who got it ready and sent it your way. He also had a hand in creating one of the products that has been especially popular over the past couple of years. We will have more on that in just a few minutes. So here’s me and Mark talking about how things work at Shop Geocaching.

CR: Well, I remember the first time that I visited the warehouse and being a geocacher. It was kind of like Charlie Bucket going into the chocolate factory on Willie Wonka. You know what I mean?

Mark Anderson: Oh, yeah [laughter]

CR: I’m like, they better check my pockets before I leave because I might just walk off with a few things. I know it’s mostly HQ people going in there. But do you ever just have a random cacher that walks through? I have to think it’d just be amazing for them.

MA: You’re not the only one to have that reaction. Definitely, we have a little bit of signage that gives us away and we also have a cache at our location if you’re in the area. But for the most part, it’s just like, we can tell oftentimes they’re searching for the cache right outside our door, which we can see their shadow, so we can maybe prepare for them to come in. If it’s nice in the summer, we often almost daily have our big bay door open. Of course, that welcomes a lot of people to just peek and in summers we’re right off the tour boats down on the waterfront. So we get quite a few visitors in the summer believe it or not for not really advertising where our warehouse is. Most of the time respectful that we don’t have maybe a ton of time. That’s the part that sometimes they wanna talk and we’re…

CR: Yeah, it’s not a visitor situation like here at HQ. 02:44″>

MA: Exactly, yeah. We try to accommodate for sure. Ironically, as most of the caching world is going into hibernation pretty soon, this is our time to shine down at the shop. Certainly the best team I’ve every worked on in 20 plus years of shipping and receiving at various places. It’s just a super unique situation and it’s a fun environment. There are a couple of us, we’re practical jokers down there a little bit, keeping it loose ’cause it is a warehouse, it’s not the most glamorous work, but we make it a fun environment.

CR: When somebody orders something from Shop Geocaching, it doesn’t go into a monster place somewhere with hundreds of people that are filling orders. There are five of you at the HQ warehouse, correct?

MA: Yeah, we’re a small operation. Yeah, just five of us, that can be lost in the mix sometimes. But again, our volume is at a place right now where we can comfortably accommodate every order placed within the last 24 hours we’ll ship the next day. We have up until noon everyday, we’ll ship every order placed before that, so it’s as real-time as we can get it. But we are not quite the scale of Amazon yet. [laughter] Hopefully some people respect that in the fact of there can be unexpected delays here and there. I primarily work with distributor orders and stuff like that, and I’ve built a really good relationship with many of them over the years.

CR: And for people that don’t know what a distributor is, we’re talking about people around the world who are reselling geocaching stuff, right?

MA: Correct, yeah.

CR: So if somebody has a shop in Washington state or in Germany, these are the distributors.

MA: Yeah, there’s a few requirements you need to meet. I think there’s a lot of operations out of basements and such, but there are a few larger ones, particularly in Europe, where I think it is the sole business, and there’s some decent size orders that head over there.

CR: One thing I’ve had people ask me is how do you guys decide what to offer on Shop Geocaching? There are some things that seem pretty obvious like cache containers and stuff like that, but there’s a lot of creativity too that I’ve noticed. You and I were talking before we started recording about the devious containers and stuff like that. So are these things that you guys at times come up with? Or is it stuff that you hear about? What’s the mix of that in determining what ends up actually being on the site available for sale?

MA: Well, it’s a little of both, I’d say. We definitely get a lot of those ideas from… I think currently we get several of those, we source those from other distributors. If other distributors have great products they’re selling, we definitely like to be a part of that as well, so things like fake pine cones and fake rocks. Actually, fake rocks I think we’ve been able to source here, but another recent one that’s been pretty popular is insects attached to nanos. That’s just sort of a fun. [chuckle] My favorite is the spider, and I’m actually finalizing one of my own that I’m gonna put out in a while that…

CR: Cool.

MA: Just another cool point, maybe another favorite point type angle. The container itself won’t be exciting, but the reveal will be the moment. Personally, I’ve only hidden a couple of them, but that’s my goal in this upcoming year is to put some creative ones out in my neighborhood ’cause there’s certainly not many creative ones. And I know that quality caches are a big thing and especially, in keeping the game healthy and getting more and more people introduced to it. You wanna find the quality cache on that first one. I’ve introduced it to people where it hasn’t been, and they’ll never cache again if they find a wet, soggy… Yeah, I don’t know. Or just your basic container. There’s the thrill of the find, but if you can add another little element of like, “Oh, oh.” Another cool one is fake chewing gum, a chewed up piece of gum that’s stuck to a nano. Those are the ones that I like the most, even though you can’t really stash much stuff in there as far as trade-ables. The kids probably don’t like em as much, but those are my personal favorites. And again, we have a lot of freedom to source and try things like that. There’s not a strict, “We’re gonna work on this type of container.” This or this. If somebody finds something or hears about something, we can usually run with it if it’s not too expensive or within reason, I guess.

CR: One of the things that I think is really cool about what you guys do is trying to make sure that the products that are offered, they have great utility to them. We were talking, for instance, before about the tree hugger product. Maybe talk about that a little bit for people that aren’t familiar with it. It’s a really cool idea, and it’s a great way to solve this problem that’s out there that people want to hide caches on trees, for instance, and unfortunately, sometimes they nail it or they drill it, which you’re not supposed to do. That’s not in line with the guidelines.

MA: Right, it’s a no, no.

CR: And now we’ve got this product that enables you to avoid that kind of a thing and hide caches in the right way, which is tree hugger.

MA: Yeah, yeah. So my manager, I think it was about a year ago, he tracked down a source that basically had this surgical tubing with a bracket, attached around a tree, and it’s not a way out there idea, but you couldn’t… Obviously, the surgical tubing will expand as the tree grows, and so that made perfect sense for attaching a cache. And that was not the intended purpose of this product out there. It’s like a livestock fence company or something like that. So they were…

CR: It’s kinda funny how many things are created, and geocachers find a way to repurpose them for caching. And definitely their intended effect is not.

MA: They were so excited though, I think and continually trying to improve their packaging, and appearance, and super cool things like that where we can promote best practice of geocaching, the rules within the game that are not always obvious and maybe newer hiders, again, may nail or screw something to a tree or something. That’s a big no, no. Things like that are not clearly marking your cache containers as a geocache, etcetera. We try to provide all those tools or as many as we can, as many as we can source. And we’re continually working on ways to promote the best practice for geocaching, and really just help improve, especially first cacher experiences. I certainly can empathize with the first cachers. When I first even joined the company, it just was so confusing to me early on. And we’re talking this was in 2008 and 2009. Yeah, it was tough for me. And even when I went out with a couple people, and it took a while for me to really grasp it and enjoy it for what it is. And I think, now, having 10 years of experience with it and the products, it’s like kind of view things differently, and you view products in different ways. There’s a lot of things that could be related to either trackable or container.

CR: One of the things that you talked about was how you and your colleagues at the shop have the freedom to try to pursue an idea and one thing that folks will know you for whether they realize it or not, because you’re involved in this very popular product, which are the buildable toy sets. And you were involved with that from the inception.

MA: Yeah, yeah. In sort of a roundabout way, yeah. We did find a first vendor that we tinkered with a trackable two-inch figure that did really well, but the vendor wasn’t… It was a secondary hobby for them. Our current vendor is just amazing with what she can do with any of these parts. She basically re-purposes these official parts, cleans and redesigns them essentially, and she can print over these actual parts, which is allowed. And we, of course, follow all legal guidelines as far as that’s concerned. We’ve been through that a little bit. And yeah, it’s turned into a nice little selection of a spread of build your own cache containers. A couple of different figures now, a male and a female figure that come with a trackable element. And we have a kitty and a dog now that attach to those buildable parts. The small things always are a good thing and you can attach em to any of these buildable brick parts that you may have at home. Your own creations make anything trackable, that’s been popular. And then the one that started it all was as far as more of a set, and really the only one that I designed [chuckle] from the beginning was the build your own ammo can container.

CR: Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. With a little nano that went inside of it.

MA: Yeah, yeah. And so that was our first experiment with an actual buildable follow the instructions, and the final result is a container that vaguely resembles an ammo can, with the latch down and everything. So yeah, I got to come up with a prototype with my kids. I pretty much came up with the design, but they have better eyes than me as far as finding all the parts. I was digging through the big box, the big random box at home, and I think it took two or three days before I came up with a pretty cool design that locked and presented it to just the co-workers at our weekly merchandise meeting that we have. And yeah, they all dug it and it was like, “Alright, let’s get it rolling.” I didn’t know how that sourcing parts, all the same parts for selling the same set and I was just… I didn’t think it was possible but this vendor is just amazing in her sourcing and she can make it all happen.

MA: Really, the finished product looks like it’s straight out of a factory. It’s really impressive. And even all the way down to the backer art like the card, just the packaging is all custom done by her and really a nice touch on top of the cool novelty item that these buildable toy sets have turned into in an ongoing series that it’s certainly fun to… I spearhead the projects, although I don’t design them really anymore at this point. Our vendor is super creative and she knows our themes and she’ll either throw ideas at us or we will do the same and she’ll come up with something. It’s pretty amazing to see her work or see the finished product.

CR: I’ll let you get a drink there.

MA: They don’t usually let us talk this much over at the warehouse.

CR: You’re getting it all out. You’re gonna get it all out today.

MA: That was my little bu-dum ching.

CR: That was pretty good. Is there a most popular product at that shop? Does it vary?

MA: Oh, golly. Well, definitely, I think trackables.

CR: Just trackables in general.

MA: Trackables in general continue to be… The old travel bug still continues to be probably the biggest selling trackable. And it’s trying to keep up with just certain events around the year. Pie day was really huge. An outside vendor did a coin for that, that was just hugely popular a couple years ago, and we had no idea. It’s those trackable coin moments that we definitely keep an eye out on.

CR: Well, I could sit here and talk about products or geocaching products for hours and hours. We’re gonna have to do a part two and a part three. We’ll bring Marty and Phil and Gary and Dylan. We’ll bring everybody from the shop and we’ll just do a big round table.

MA: Are you sure? I mean. This might be… This talk is a little too hot for most years, I know.

CR: No, I think it’s awesome. God, it’s music to my ears, I love talking about it. But thank you and we’ll chat again sometime.

MA: Oh, yeah, Chris. It was a blast.

CR: That was Mark Anderson, aka markstafari from Shop Geocaching. Interesting talk, I hope you enjoyed it. So here’s my next question. What would you like to hear us talk about on Inside Geocaching HQ? You can email us, podcast at geocaching.com is the address. That is podcast at geocaching.com. Tell us what sounds interesting and we’ll see if we can work it into an upcoming episode. Thanks again to Mark for his time. Thanks to you for listening. Until next time, from all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.