Starting a Baby Boutique & Clothing Line

Rambling and Social Networking

OH, they meant having a clothing line would really be a lot of work?!?!

Well, duh, but at least it’s work I love. I’ve spent a bit too much time beating myself up, or at the very least, spinning my wheels. I picked up a notebook from a year ago and it had these ideas of ways for me to improve my time management, my productivity, my blah blah blah. And those “ideas” haven’t helped in the last year, no matter how many times I’ve tried to implement them. Sick of it already. Instead of always taking such a “big picture” approach, I’m thinking that I’m going to step in a little bit and step out of my comfort zone again. Focus. One baby step at a time. I see the next “to do” and raise you Watch me go, up up up and out of my comfort zone.

Which, it turns out, is REALLY good for your brain and the progression of your personality (no, really, it’s true). I saw a special about it. So, now it’s about soaring into a new vision cycle. I’ve had all these great ideas that would involve me stretching out of my safe cave, so I’ve been doing all the comfortable stuff instead. Well, it’s time to grow.

On the what HAS been happening side, we’ve already starting implementing a new vision and direction for the website - and it’s very exciting.

On the big “to do” side is finding the perfect packaging for our organic onesie gift sets.

On the growing-the-business side, I’ve been very much focusing on social media lately and I can’t tell you how many incredibly wonderful, trippy, funny, and intelligent people I’m getting to know. If you are starting a business, you’re building your brand and you need an online presence - you need to become the expert in what you do, you need to make others aware of you. Here are some good places to start:

• twitter.com
  
• Facebook (make sure you create your own personal profile as well as a business page for your “fans”)
• mompreneursonline.com
• twittermoms.com
• squidoo
• LinkedIn

Just create your profiles and join the conversation! Start sharing your knowledge, resources you like, tid- bits about your business and your daily life, anything that comes to mind. It’ll help your site SEO.

5 comments September 17th, 2008

Uturn: running a clothing line the wrong way

Ok, so where have I been? I think that maybe I don’t even know. It’s been a very crazy and very stressful couple of months and so I just hid my head in a hole. Everything was going so great at the beginning of the summer. But it got tough in July? Why? Because it’s too freaking hard to do everything. Because I’m not running this business the right way. Because I wanted to believe that I knew how to do it all and could figure it out and it’s really very very hard to get it right.

On the wholesale orders side, if I can get an appointment and get into a boutique, the line sells, no problem. The problem is the first part - the time it takes to be the sales rep. The time it takes to make all the calls and follow-up emails and get to the appointments. It’s a full-time job, which meant that everything else was getting neglected - admin stuff, DESIGNING, PR - ugh I can’t even think of it all right now.

So, the answer is what the answer was when I first started out - delegate and get help - put people who are better than you are in place to help you.  I have this in place for the web stuff and the production / manufacturing part - the actual sewing I need to get it into place with the sales stuff. We have picked up an east coast rep, but I’ve been too nutty to even give that the attention it needs. We need a sales rep on the west coast. I’m struggling just to manage all the accounts I did go out and create in the last few months, much less get around to getting new ones - which we definitely need.

So, low-and-behold, I don’t have all the answers and in retrospect, I’ve probably given some mis-guided advice on this blog. Or I’m just experiencing growing pains. I’m sick of hearing from everyone that I’m too hard on myself, so I’m going to tell you that this isn’t what this is about. This is about taking a realistic look at the way we’ve been doing things and taking a pro-active stance to change it for the better, for the survival of the business.

I want to be running a business and designing a successful clothing line, instead of being a nut job which does no good for my mental state, my family, or the state of the business. I want to finally be able to put out my first real collection, and to do that means I need to get a lot of stuff more organized and I need some really good people who are experts in their field to wear some of the hats I’ve been wearing.

Which I know can and will happen, now that I have some direction in my head.

3 comments September 5th, 2008