Most of my sales from my small business is online. Until recently, ALL of my business was online but now my business is growing through wholesaling and craft shows. Wholesaling is a whole different animal. It’s lots of fun. You put out all the money up front to fulfill orders and then you hound people to pay you money. Now I know how my paper guy feels.

But craft shows? Welcome to the mother lode.

You read that right. Craft shows. Your town has a fall festival? Chances are that festival has vendors. Ranging from the size of the event, you can pay as little as $25 for a table at a local elementary school. The top end I have seen is $1050 for a two-day wine event. That seems like so much money but people were paying $85 to wine taste for only 4 hours. If you are willing to pay $85 to attend an event, you probably will not balk at paying $25 for a t-shirt. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, let’s get political. Why not? Not really. I just want to talk about the bailout and all the conversation it’s generating. I will apologize upfront. My husband is a free market economist. We subscribe to The Economist. You can already see where this is going.

I listened to the partisan politics. Both sides screaming that the people should be getting the bailout, not the financial institutions. I’m not sure exactly how that would happen but wouldn’t that be awesome? A check in the mail for around $ 4,000 to every taxpayer?

I began to argue with my husband about the reasoning for the bailout. I mean, if my business goes under, there is no one to bail me out. With no expectations that the government is going to hand me a blank check, I make careful decisions. If my decisions are wrong, then it’s on me. My husband said that without money, the banks would have no money to loan. Money to loan to whom? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m banging this post out on my two week old laptop. My laptop which, at this moment, is lighter because it lacks a space bar, numbers 1, 2, and 3, tab, shift lock, shift and maybe a function key? Let me say it again. NEW laptop.

It seems that while I took my 4 minutes to make lunch, The Baby took his 4 minutes to rapidly rip as many keys off my keyboard as he could before he got busted. That would be over 30. To say that I cried would be a mild understatement. This was my laptop that we couldn’t afford but that my husband said I needed because of all the trouble Read the rest of this entry »

Here is the post where I start to complain about how I have so much to do because the trade show in Vegas was so successful for me and then I realize that is horrible because there were lots of people there who would love to have my problem.

So I will make my apologies for whining about success, accept that the day will come at some point of this business where I am saying, “remember that time I was complaining that I had TOO much work to do? WOW, do I wish I had that problem now!!!” and move on to getting my life in order.

And realizing that the only way I am going to get through the day is to set out all my tasks and knock them out one by one. Personally I think it would better to just lie down on the couch in The Defeat of the Overwhelmed, heralded by moose track popcorn and a can of high fructose corn syrup-laced Pepsi. Because when you have your own business, you can just rely on your employees to be responsible and get things done. No, wait. You don’t HAVE any employees. Well, you have Susie Sunshine but she doesn’t count because she is at the end of the earth in Michigan so it’s not like she’s coming any time soon to screen print.

She can be bossy about business from afar though. She was back on her list rampage when I called to tell her that I wasn’t managing to get anything done at all. She reminded me that if I make a list and I just complete one task, I fill find energy and motivation I didn’t know I even had. Brilliant, right?

Sometimes finishing one little task on your list will energize you enough to cruise right through the rest of the list. If it does nothing else, the list gives you a sense of satisfaction when you can cross something off and gives you a sense of closure when you complete it. I think I’ll just be ignoring the fact that my list is two pages long. You can’t let it bring you down.

I’m back from the big trade show in Las Vegas. It goes through Thursday, but Susie Sunshine is holding down the fort for me so I could come back home and get to work. And lots of work, there is. I learned a good lesson in Vegas. Sometimes the business comes from the most unlikely places.

Things went really slow on Sunday. And Monday. I was starting to wonder if this was a big mistake and that maybe I was throwing my money away being at this show. My husband gave me the “you will never know if you don’t try it” speech and I started to Read the rest of this entry »

OK, that’s not how the saying goes but that is my life these days. All of those mailers I decided to do? I ended up with 624. While affixing address label number 618, I noticed the address said “Santa Monica Boulevard, Richmond, VA.”

You see where this is going. In case you don’t know, there is no Santa Monica Boulevard in Richmond. I know this personally. I should have been tipped off by the Hawaiian street names in Tennessee before that but I was too Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Wendy is really trying to fix me. She is the one that brought me into the wild and crazy world of craft shows. She swears by craft shows. Once you get beyond all those people who pull out 9 million items from the back of a minivan and then proceed to sell thousands of dollars of items that sell for $2.50, it’s fairly uneventful.

The problem is, those craft show people? They know what they are doing. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, who am I kidding?

You know this post is about how I’m putting off until tomorrow what I could have gotten done today. Or what I should have done two weeks ago. I blame it all on my lack of design skills. I had postcards to create (and send out) before the trade show. I went on the printing website about 6 times and calculated out the production schedule. Every day I delayed, the production completion time went later and later.

Guess who is getting her postcards delivered on her vacation next week? That’s right. I am. Read the rest of this entry »

When I started this business, I had 5 maternity tees. That’s it. I had a couple of color options but we were still only looking at five shirts. Now? I don’t even know. If I had to guess, I would go with around one hundred. And the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I had a woman walk by my booth at a craft show. She paused. “Mommy needs a cocktail,” she said. “That’s funny. I’d buy one but the words are too small.”

The thing is, that’s the point. That’s the crux of the whole thing. That’s the kick. Read the rest of this entry »

I got a killer piece of advice from Jaime when I was at Blogher. She said that her biggest mistake was getting all caught up in designing her display for the big trade show and she didn’t take the time to reach out to potential customers BEFORE going.

Brilliant.

Not that I was stressing about my display yet. Because it isn’t even September yet. Why think about something until you have to leave tomorrow? Read the rest of this entry »