Prepared by SYNHERGY for Gita Singh and Joy Hocker
The social is working. The business needs a different fix.
A look back at our work since August 2025, an honest read on why sales slipped even as the marketing did its job, and a calm plan ranked by what matters most.
Jackalope (Global House, Inc.) · Albuquerque & Santa Fe · Facebook & Instagram program · Baseline year Aug 2024 to Aug 2025, compared with our period Aug 2025 to Jun 2026. Start with section 01 and read only as far as you like. Everything after it is backup.
Start here
If this is the only page you read, it is the one that matters. Three true things, the single biggest threat, and what to do first.
True
The marketing is working.
Reach and impressions are up many times over since we started. The work you hired us for is delivering.
Also true
The sales drop is real.
Albuquerque down 14% in your two biggest months deserves a real answer, not a defense of likes.
The hard part
They are not the same problem.
Social builds attention. What turns attention into sales lives mostly elsewhere, and most of it is switched off.
The single biggest threat
Every month of the year is a sale, so full price has quietly stopped existing. That bleeds your margin and trains shoppers to wait, and it bites hardest in the exact months you depend on.
The biggest opportunity is the mirror image: a customer list you actually own, plus a simple way to buy that pulls people into the store. Those turn your loyal audience into repeatable, measurable revenue. Here is the order we would tackle it.
Ease peak-season discounts. Start an email list.
Lighten the discount in your two biggest months. That decision costs nothing. And put the email list you own to work, capturing every new customer, the highest-return channel in retail. Email is outside today's social-only agreement, so it is a small new investment, not free, but the best one on this list.
Fix the photo and stock library. Report each store on its own.
A current, organized image library makes every ad, post, and web page better at once. And we start reporting the Albuquerque ads separately from the Santa Fe ones, using Meta's built-in location breakdown, so you can finally see each store on its own.
Test reserve-online pickup. Rethink the sale calendar.
Once the website and photos are current, test letting locals reserve an item online and pick it up in store. It pulls people in, it does not replace the wander. Then move to fewer, more meaningful sales built around your 50th anniversary.
Platform data, Meta's especially, is directional, not gospel. It drifts, it under-reports, and Instagram in particular has real gaps. We use it to make informed calls, never absolute ones, and we say so wherever a number is doing heavy lifting.
Your email, answered in one line each
Are the likes still growing, and who are they?
Reach is up sharply. The reliable read is older and local on Facebook. Likes were never the scoreboard. Section 05.
Is Facebook cheaper than Instagram, and do we need both?
Yes, about half the cost per person. Keep both, they do different jobs. Section 05.
Can we measure real success?
Yes, with local reach, clicks, and once email and ordering exist, traceable revenue. Section 10.
Did combining the accounts hurt us?
No. It was the frugal, correct call. We just add store-level tracking on top. Section 10.
The whole picture, one screen
A plain SWOT before the deep dives. Where you are strong, where you are exposed, and where the room to grow is hiding.
Strengths
- A loyal, high-intent local audience that buys home and garden, your exact category.
- 50 years of New Mexico heritage and a genuinely curated, hard-to-copy product mix.
- Paid reach now scaled and steady: roughly 90,000 people a year.
- Santa Fe is cushioned by record state tourism.
Weaknesses
- An email list that predates us, but it sits underused, and newer followers are not being captured.
- Outdated photos and website make current stock invisible and dent price perception.
- A near-constant discount cycle that erodes margin and brand.
- No way to buy unless you walk in the door.
- Sales launched the day they start, before the announcement can travel.
Opportunities
- Email marketing, the highest-return channel in retail by far.
- Local online ordering with pickup, which lifts foot traffic and basket size.
- A 50th-anniversary reposition from discounter to heritage and value.
- Latent demand beyond the metro, including out-of-state and overseas fans.
Threats
- A soft, discretionary category and post-tariff pullback hitting Albuquerque first.
- The discount habit training customers to never pay full price.
- Rising platform costs and shrinking organic reach on rented channels.
- About half of furniture now bought online, where you do not yet sell.
The market around you
Start outside the four walls. The timing of your dip lines up with forces hitting the whole region, not with anything in your feed.
Why Albuquerque and not Santa Fe
Home and garden is a discretionary, big-ticket category, the first thing people pause on when money feels tight. Those sales have been slipping nationally, and since spring 2025 tariffs and economic worry cooled them further.
- Santa Fe is buffered by record tourism dollars.
- Albuquerque leans on the local economy, so a local pullback shows up there first.
- That is exactly your split: Albuquerque down, Santa Fe holding. A social problem would not spare one store.
You are not alone in this
A longtime Santa Fe retailer announced it was closing this year, naming tariffs and the soft season directly.
Sources: IBISWorld 2026 · NM Tourism Dept · Santa Fe New Mexican · Travel + Leisure.
What's working
Before SYNHERGY, the page ran almost no advertising. Once real budget went behind the work, here is what changed.
Reach, month by month, with us
Meta Ads, Aug 2025 to Jun 2026. June is partial and left off.
Read this plainly
We took a page that was nearly invisible in paid reach and put it in front of about ninety thousand people, steadily, through the holidays and into spring.
That is real, and it matters. It is also why the rest of this is worth your time: attention went up, and attention was never the thing that was broken.
Who is listening, and FB vs Instagram
You asked who engages, how old they are, and whether you need both platforms. Here is the honest read, including where the data is shaky.
the reach for the same money, about half the cost per person
the reach for nearly the same spend, because the audience is fresher
What we are confident about
- The same budget reaches about twice as many people on Facebook. That part is solid.
- Your buying core is loyal and local, and it skews toward women 45 and over.
- This is a stable audience seen often, not an endless stream of strangers.
What the platforms are probably doing
- Facebook is the cheaper, older, local channel. It is where the buyer is.
- Instagram looks like discovery and inspiration, likely a younger, fresher audience, which is why it costs more to reach there.
- The recent follower jump on Instagram supports that read.
Keep both, and post the same thing to both. What changes is how you aim them. Target Facebook tightly at local shoppers, because that is where the buyers are. Let Instagram run wider, because that is where new and younger people find you.
We would not limit Instagram to only older shoppers. Its one real advantage is reaching fresh, younger eyes, so limiting it would waste that. And making separate posts for each platform is not realistic while the photo problem on the next page exists. So the plan is simple: same posts, different targeting.
The quiet problem behind everything
This one rarely makes it into a report, but it drags down the ads, the website, and even how your prices are perceived, all at once.
Where it hurts today
- Current stock is hard to photograph and harder to find, so images lag behind what is actually on the floor.
- The website shows older merchandise, which quietly tells shoppers the store is not fresh.
- Stale, busy photos make beautiful pieces look ordinary, which makes the price feel high.
The fix, and why it pays for itself
- One organized, current photo library that every channel pulls from. No more hunting.
- A simple monthly capture routine so new arrivals are shot on a schedule, not in a scramble.
- Lean into the editorial, styled scene look that already softened price complaints when we used it.
Fix the photos once and three things improve at the same time: the ads convert better, the website finally looks current, and the prices feel earned. It is the cheapest high-leverage fix on this list.
The pattern in your own calendar
Built entirely from your posts and ad campaigns. No interpretation added, just a year of it on one page.
What this trains a shopper to do
- Every month carries at least one storewide discount. Many carry two or three.
- Almost every one is 15% off everything at a minimum, often 25 to 65% off whole departments.
- When the discount never stops, the sale price becomes the real price, and paying full price starts to feel like a mistake.
- So the smartest move for any customer is the one they are making: wait. Another sale is always two weeks out.
The cost, in your peak season
The shoppers who would have paid full price in May and June are the same ones sitting on their hands, waiting for the markdown they have learned always comes.
Your sales have no runway
A separate problem from how often you run sales: how you launch them. Right now most of your audience never sees the announcement in time.
Why a day-of launch can't land
The dashed line is where your sale ends. Notice that the reach and the ad optimization are only just arriving to the right of it, after the sale is already over.
What it costs you
- The organic post reaches most of your followers around days 3 to 5. Your sale is over by then.
- Meta ads spend the first week or two in a learning phase, paying the worst rates while the system figures out who to show them to. Cut off at day 2 to 4, they never get there.
- Even email, your fastest channel, only catches whoever opens that one day.
- You pay for reach the sale ends before you can use.
The fix is free: give every sale a runway
- Tease it 3 to 5 days ahead. A "something is coming" build before the doors open.
- Start the ads early so they exit learning before the sale, not during it.
- Run email as a sequence: heads-up, then launch, then last chance.
- Same sale, same budget. Just announced on a schedule the algorithm can keep up with.
This pairs with running fewer sales. A handful of well-promoted moments with real runway will out-earn a string of day-of flash sales that almost no one sees in time.
What endless discounting did to bigger names
This is not theory. Two giants drove into the ditch from opposite directions, and two more found the road between them.
Ditch 1 · never stopped discounting
Bed Bath & Beyond
Bankrupt
Decades of coupons trained shoppers never to buy without one. The brand came to look overpriced at full price, margins bled, and in 2023 it filed for bankruptcy.
Ditch 2 · quit sales cold turkey
JCPenney
-$4.3B
In 2012 it scrapped coupons for everyday low prices overnight. Customers felt overcharged without the savings game, sales fell $4.3B in a year, and the CEO was gone.
The road · dialed it back, leaned on heritage
Coach & Ralph Lauren
All-time high
Both were once over-discounted and looked cheap. They pulled back on markdowns, refocused on quality and heritage, and rebuilt pricing power. Coach just posted record results.
The lesson, for you
Do not do this
Discount constantly
The Bed Bath & Beyond path. Trains waiting, kills margin and brand.
Do this, gradually
Fewer, real sales plus a value and heritage story
Wean off the constant markdown over time. Keep a handful of genuine moments a year. Tell the craft story so full price feels earned. This is the Coach road.
Do not do this either
Kill all sales overnight
The JCPenney path. Shoppers revolt and feel overcharged. Never cold turkey.
To be clear, we are not recommending everyday-low-pricing. That is the JCPenney mistake. We are recommending the middle road, eased in over time, and your 50th anniversary in 2026 is the perfect moment to start telling that story.
Why likes aren't sales
The honest answer to your hardest question, plus a straight word on the combined accounts, which were the right call.
What social can do
Put you in front of the right people, again and again. Keep the store top of mind. Drive awareness, foot traffic, and clicks. It is doing all of this.
What it cannot do alone
Ring up a sale when there is no online checkout, no email follow-up, and a website that cannot transact. Attention has nowhere to convert, so it cannot be tied to revenue.
Likes measure attention. Sales need a path from attention to purchase. That path has never been built, so of course the two numbers drift apart.
On combining the accounts
It was the smart, frugal move, and we would make it again. The alternative was funding up to four separate assets, two Facebook pages and two Instagram accounts, each needing its own budget and its own content. That spreads money thin and multiplies the workload.
The only tradeoff is a blended view that mixes the two stores. Here is what we can do about that, and what only you can.
What we can and cannot see
- From the ads: Meta breaks results out by location, so we report the Albuquerque-targeted campaigns apart from the Santa Fe ones. That is the store-level view, and we can turn it on now.
- The honest limit: your organic posts run through one shared page, so those cannot be split by store. That is the tradeoff of the single account, and it is not worth undoing.
- The real scoreboard is yours: your weekly sales by store. Social data cannot produce that number. If you share it, we line it up against what we ran.
The biggest untapped lever: email
Of everything here, this is the one we would start first. It is the highest-return channel in retail, and you own it forever.
Rented (social today)
- Meta decides who sees you, and it is shrinking that number.
- You pay every time to reach the same people.
- If an account is limited or lost, the audience goes with it.
Owned (email)
- You reach the inbox directly, any time, for almost nothing.
- The list is yours, it compounds, and no platform can take it.
- Email is the highest-ROI channel in retail, ahead of search and ads.
You already have an email list from before us, which is a real asset. The gap is everyone since: thousands of newer followers and customers you have no email for. Capture every one of them going forward, keep the older list, and send both writing people actually want to open.
One honest note. Email is not part of today's social-only agreement with us. We are putting it first because it is the biggest lever you are not pulling, and we would be glad to build and run it with you as a next step.
Sources: Litmus State of Email, retail benchmark $45 per $1 · EmailTooltester, 5 to 8 sends per month highest ROI at $48 per $1 · MailerLite 2025 benchmarks · Twilio, 79% of consumers prefer email from brands.
More moves, and a few bold ideas
None of these is a bigger social budget. Each builds something you own, and the boldest ones turn your own problems into advantages.
One honest note on scope. Your current agreement with us covers social media and ads. Most of what follows, the email list, the photo system, online ordering, would be new work we take on together. We lay it out because it is what the business needs, not because it is already covered.
Build a current photo and stock library.
Start here, because it makes everything else work. One organized library, with new arrivals shot on a monthly schedule, in the editorial style that already lifted how the products and prices read.
One fix, three wins: better ads, a current website, prices that feel earned.Wean off the discount, the right way.
Not cold turkey. Over the year, thin the calendar to a few real sales, hold honest and steady prices in between (steady is not the same as lower), and let the craft and heritage story carry the value. Anchor the shift to the 50th anniversary.
Protects margin and brand at once. The Coach road, not the JCPenney cliff.Test reserve-online pickup. It is not a pivot.
This does not turn Jackalope into an online store, and it does not replace the wander. It is the opposite. Someone sees a specific pot or chair online, reserves it, and comes in to get it. Then they wander, which is the thing you are best at.
- Across retail, about 3 in 4 pickup shoppers buy something more once they are inside. That number comes from broad retail, not destination stores like yours, so treat it as a reason to test, not a promise.
- It only works once the website is current and you can see real stock, which is why it comes after the photo fix, not before.
Outside the box
A Jackalope insiders club, not more coupons.
Early access, members-only previews, a birthday perk. It gives loyal shoppers the "I got something special" feeling that research says they crave, without a public markdown that cheapens the brand.
"Ship it home" for Santa Fe tourists.
Record tourism is in the state right now. A visitor cannot carry a console table onto a plane, but they will happily ship it. This quietly tests demand beyond the metro with almost no risk.
Lean into events that already work.
Your bonsai demos drew people in. Make events a regular beat: planting clinics, artisan trunk shows, workshops. Traffic drivers that build community and never touch a discount.
Turn new arrivals into a "first look."
The photo routine pays off twice: every fresh shipment becomes a recurring first-look email and post. The inventory you struggle to photograph becomes your most-opened content.
The plan, in baby steps
Ranked by urgency, sized so none of it is overwhelming, with the handful of numbers worth watching instead of likes.
Ease peak-season discounts, start the email list, and give sales a runway.
Lighten the May and June discounts and give every sale a few days of runway instead of launching the day of. Both cost nothing to start. Add an email signup at the register and online so newer customers get captured too. Running the list well is a small new investment beyond today's scope, and the highest-return one available.
Stand up the photo library, and split Albuquerque tracking.
A monthly capture routine and one organized library. Separate the ad reporting by store so we can watch Albuquerque on its own.
Test reserve-online pickup, and build the 50th-anniversary reposition.
Once photos and the website are current, test reserve-online pickup. Thin the sale calendar toward fewer, realer moments, anchored to the anniversary and the heritage story.
Measure these, not likes
- Local reach to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, reported separately.
- Engagement from a real local audience, not just totals.
- Email list size, and revenue per send once it exists.
- Pickup reservations, and the add-on sales they bring in store.
- Weekly sales by store, lined up against what we ran.
The short version
Stop renting your whole audience. Start owning one. Make full price feel fair again. Give people a way to buy.
The marketing is not the problem, and it was never going to be the whole solution. The real levers are still sitting untouched, and they are the ones that compound. Let us switch them on, in order, together.
None of this is a verdict on the work, or on you. It is the clearest map we can draw of where the leaks are and where the growth is hiding. We are glad to walk it with you, at whatever pace feels right.