In January 2005 Strawberry announced it would be shipping a redesigned calendar in December 2005 for the 2006 calendar year. The goal at the time was to make the 2006 Strawberry Calendar a twenty five year retrospective featuring twenty five years of Strawberry photos. Instead, what we sent you this past December was a stylish Holiday Card featuring original art and a format similar to cards sent in previous years.

Following the last calendar announcement, several important events occurred that changed the feasibility of the calendar project. Following is a brief explanation.

The first Strawberry Calendar was published for the 1993 festivals as a marketing piece designed to sell tickets to the festivals. The most recent Strawberry Calendar was published for the 2004 season. Throughout its twelve year history the calendars primary mission remained constant: To sell tickets to the festivals.

In past years, with exceptionally good luck, the calendar would ship right around April 1st. As each year progressed, when the calendar arrived in your mailbox, there were fewer and fewer tickets available to purchase for the festivals. This trend reached its height in the 2004 season; by the time the calendar hit, the Spring Festival was completely sold out and the Fall Festival had in the neighborhood of 150 tickets left. An evolving trend of festivals selling out earlier each year rendered the calendars primary mission obsolete.

It wasn't until after the January 2005 announcement that we actually looked at the costs associated with increasing the size of the calendar. (Yep, it would have been much wiser of Strawberry to consider these costs before making the January 2005 announcement.) This was a sobering process that naturally led to a reexamination of the feasibility of the calendar in terms of its expense and the resulting benefit to ticket sales. Although the Strawberry Staff loved the calendar, the obvious conclusion was we were wasting a great deal of money by mailing over 30,000 calendars to sell 8,000 adult tickets that would now sell out without any marketing piece. In addition, we had to consider that possibly 20,000 of those calendars were never looked at and simply ended up in the garbage. Clearly a great deal of money and resources were being wasted.

Next, because we said we were sending out a calendar, we considered making a twenty five year retrospective calendar for just ticket buyers and staff. Then, we considered the reality of what that would entail. We are a small staff to begin with. The year 2005 found us dealing with some unanticipated life and business events that stretched us thin and had a dramatic impact on the time available for a project of the calendars scope. We knew if we were going to do a calendar showcasing twenty five years of Strawberry Music Festivals we needed to do it the right way, not throw something shoddy together just to do it. The reality is there wasn't enough time for the staff resources to successfully produce a 2006 Strawberry Calendar.

We hoped to make this announcement after we had a plan in place for future marketing pieces. Some of you, however, are anxious for information now. We are awfully sorry to disappoint those of you who were looking forward to the calendar. We hope you understand that making changes that better reflect the human and business environment we operate in is necessary to our vitality and future growth. We thank you for your continued support and are honored to share twenty five years of the Strawberry community with you this year.

The Strawberry Staff