Posts filed under 'The Startup Phase'
Finally! A picture of our booth at the ABC Show. Takes me forever to get pictures off our camera and uploaded and even
this picture cut off the top of the booth. But that was our booth at the show.
I see so many things that I would change already. We’re not at the point of having a hardwall booth yet, which I would love. I don’t know how much of a difference that would make. It is definitely different to do a show that has low (3′) sidewalls, vs. a show that has full 8 ft sidewalls.
Someday I’m going to come up with the perfect way to display our blankets. They need to be spread out so the name is eye-catching, but I also want to show that there is a variety of options.
Like I said in a previous post, all we can do is get better each time. Can you tell that I don’t like this booth anymore? Almost sounds like I’m trying to make excuses, but it is HONESTLY leaps and bounds above our first trade show display booth.
But you know, it’s a reminder that you have to just start somewhere and go for it. No matter what, you’re always going to want to make it better; there is always a part of you that will feel like if you just change this or that, THEN you’ll be ready to launch; THEN you’ll be ready to show off. But really, you have to just leap, you have to give yourself permission to have room for improvement. Make sure you believe in the quality of your products before leaping, of course. Quality matters a lot.
Basically, if we expect it to be perfect before we go for it, we’ll never start, we’ll never meet our own expectations (=misery), and we’ll miss the whole journey. Someday I’ll have a great trade show booth - for now we’re doing the best we can and trying different things each time.
October 4th, 2007
I got an email last night from someone I met at that tradeshow. This is someone who made an appointment to see us at the show, interested in carrying our personalized baby blankets in their personalized gift boutique. They came, they critiqued, they balked that OUR LABEL WAS ON OUR PRODUCTS, and then they left.
I sent a follow-up email after the tradeshow, to say “great to meet you” and blah blah niceties. Two weeks go by and I get a response last night - telling me they won’t be carrying our blankets but to let them know when if we ever have new prints, oh and by the way - “I hope you got a chance to see what some of the other bedding companies are doing”.
And that was how it ended. Not even a period at the end of that sentence. At first I didn’t know why it bothered me. Besides the fact that we define ourselves as a trend-setting company and “copying” other companies is the last thing I’m into, what bothered me is that there was absolutely no reason for the snippiness. No reason at all.
So, I guess those are some of “those” people that you run into in this business. But all it does is confirm for me that I never want to become one of those people. All she did was leave a bad impression on me - and confirm that no, I will not be contacting her when we have new prints. Or ever. On the bright side, darn it if isn’t “those” people that light an extra fire, make me want to prove all the more how successful we’re going to be…so maybe we need a little snippiness here and there.
October 1st, 2007
I think that this question is the theme of the week. I received an email from a new reader yesterday, asking me if it would be worth it to go into the children’s clothing business at all. Today, I read this mom-entrepreneur’s blog post on how the entrepreneurial world is less-than-ideal.
As far as to whether it’s worth it to go into the children’s industry in particular - my main answer is that the decision is personal. Only you know what products you have in mind. You then have to do the research to find out if the market will take on your product. What is your niche? What will set you apart from the competition? How will you market your products and what price-point are you aiming for? Do you see yourself selling great designs at great prices or luxurious products for a higher price point? What sales and distribution channels will you use?
I definitely believe you have to have a niche. You have to have something unique and different enough to make people overlook your “newness” and take a risk on you.
As far as to whether it’s worth it to go into any kind of business for yourself, my answer is a hundred times over “yes”. Personally, I hate working for other people. Don’t get my wrong, I know how to play the game. I know how to hold a job and move up the rungs of the ladder. But I hated that life. I DO work a lot, a lot, a LOT harder now, but I get bigger rewards, and I see my kids about 800% more than I used to when I spent my days in an office building. And it’s humbling too!
I’ve made a zillion mistakes and have wasted a ton of money by starting my own business. But I’ve grown by leaps and bounds, and I’ve learned a zillion things from those zillion mistakes. I enjoy the journey, I enjoy challenging myself, and I’m starting to enjoy pushing myself outside of my comfort level.
All that being said, no business is worth going into if you don’t LOVE it. You have to love it to push yourself through years of hard work and little sleep.
August 20th, 2007
As I was sitting in my office / sewing room this morning, I remembered receiving a comment recently from a reader who mentioned she wished for her own sewing room. I never got around to replying (my apologies), but I had wanted to share with her that I haven’t always had a sewing room / working office either.
Everything, absolutely everything, is a building process when you’re starting a business. Including the office space. My first office was our dining room table. I remember having the sewing machine on one end of the table, and my sleeping baby (safely strapped in her bouncy seat) on the other end of the table. Stealing precious moments while she slept to dive head first into some crazy dream I had about becoming a fashion designer and selling my designs to stores. 
I’ve always been really aware of the passage of time, somewhat nostalgic too - and I’ve developed habits of marking times in my life. I know that I specifically took a picture of our dining room, overrun with sewing supplies and fabrics, so that, in the future, I could see how far we’ve REALLY come.
When you hear that people started their businesses out of their garages, I would bet that’s only half the truth. I’m sure they started on their dining room tables, or in the den, and grew to their garages. We outgrew each of our offices fast (dining room, then spare bedroom, then that + half of our living room), plus had another baby, so we had literally had to change houses. Our “offices” now take up a California room (enclosed patio) and a living room. So, soon, we’ll be bursting out of our garage.
We always have visions of our goals, and we’re envisioning grand offices at a this great new river business park nearby. I wonder how long it will take us to get there.
June 8th, 2007
Whenever I’m having “downtime” and surfing the internet, I read some articles on Entrepreneur.com. I just read this article on success secrets for starting a business. I found it interesting, and I think anyone who is considering starting a business, or who has started a business, would find it interesting; so I’m sharing.
I know that the article isn’t specific to starting a clothing line, but it provides some food for thought. Here are the seven “essential principles” to practice in order to be a successful entrepreneur:
- Clarity
- Competence
- Constraints
- Creativity
- Concentration
- Courage
- Continuous Action
As I read the article, I evaluated myself in each principle area. I’m stronger in some than others, but it made me consider focusing on building my strength in those areas where I’m weak.
I’ve been getting a lot of questions and I’m going to do my best to answer them over the next couple of weeks in these blog posts. I promise. So, if I haven’t responded immediately, I will soon!!!
June 7th, 2007
When I first started down this path I read in more than one reference book how big of a deal it is to ship on time. I had no idea that the reason it’s such a big deal is because it’s a really hard thing to do. I’m on it about 95% of the time, but that still leaves 5% of the time that stuff doesn’t come through on time.
As my husband said to me yesterday, about an item we’re a whole week late on shipping, “That’s TERRIBLE.” Because it IS flipping terrible. And as hard as I try, it happens once in a while. Sometimes it’s events down the line, issues with the contractors, but most of the time it’s fair to chalk it up to poor project planning. And there’s no one to blame for that but me.
We have a constant production cycle with our blankets, which are dropped into production upon placement of the order. Now we’re throwing traditional production cycles on top of that and I have to figure out how to plan it all and make sure that we are consistently on top of our shipments.
Not shipping on time to these few customers isn’t the end of the world. But I feel horrible about it. Sick to my stomach almost - and even as I say that I feel like surely I could’ve carved a few more hours out of last week to make it happen. Am I slacking? Am I doing the best I can do?
Yesterday I made the radical decision to straighten up my office - using those hours for cleaning instead of all the stuff I need to do to get above said item shipped on Monday. I’m determined to get it organized like it’s never been organized before. And this event has been sparked by two things: first, because a fellow designer recently posted her freshly Spring Cleaned office on her blog, which made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. I told her I would send her a picture of mine - but when I took the picture and looked at how truly horribly dis-organized and messy my office looked, I was too embarressed to actually send it. Second, I’ve been reading “Simple Abundance” and it’s all about Spring Cleaning towards mental refreshment right now. So, I was inspired. And desperate for the clean out.
For my mental health, I needed to carve the time out yesterday to start getting the office into some kind of working condition. It’s finally organized into stations: embroidery station, shipping station, my main work table and my designing desk. And then there’s the loads and loads of fabric I have that I’m not supposed to have because I wasn’t supposed to buy it until orders were placed. ha ha -
How we’re going to sell through all that fabric almost needs to be a seperate business plan. I laugh, but really, it’s not so funny. At least I can see it now. I see many bibs and mini-blankets in that fabric’s future.
May 20th, 2007
People always ask me what it’s like to run my own clothing line. Or they ask what it’s like to start my own business. I asked this a lot when I was first convincing myself that the idea was feasible. Tonight, I have a simple answer. It’s a lot of late nights and early mornings. It’s giving up TV and convincing yourself to do one more thing on your to-do list; like create the additional versions of a product packaging graphic (which I LOVE).
The crazy thing about it is that if you have found the right business to start, meaning the right business for you, something you love, then you won’t care that it means a lot of late nights and early mornings. Sometimes, you’ll be so thrilled by the momentum in your business that you won’t even think about sleep; other times you’ll hit lulls and sneak in more sleep (the lulls do a body good).
I’m always tell myself there’ll be time for the sleeping when this business is well-begun. And, we’re in a ramp up to a weekend event, so there’s extra-lateness to our nights and extra-earliness to our mornings. But it’s the best thing in the world to me, because my kids went with me to my final appointment tonight and because I make the rules, which, obnoxious as it is, is important to me.
April 25th, 2007
I’m trying to keep from spreading ourselves too thin. Just as our personalized blankets start rolling I’m off and running with other things. But I need to reel myself in. The blankets are rolling, keep them rolling. We have a good thing going and we’ve finally almost worked through all of the kinks.
I shipped display kits to three different states yesterday! YES!!! This is a big thing for us. This is an exciting thing for us. And I feel good about the kit that we’ve put together, we’ve covered all of the bases, from the redemption brochures to a FAQ sheet.
We have our blankets in one of the hottest San Diego boutiques and I stopped in last week to give them updated brochures. Our blankets had been in the store for a week and she sold one right before I walked in. Which was exciting, and which had raised questions for the boutique. Good questions, because we can now come up for a solution for something we hadn’t thought of on our own.
A friend of mine is considering entering the pet industry and was asking me if I thought it’d be better for her to go through the development of a niche product or just start with graphics on ready-made products. Niche, niche, niche.
I recently heard from friends and family how disappointed they were in me for switching from baby clothing (my first idea behind starting the business) to blankets. They never asked me why I did it, only told me just recently THEY didn’t think it was a good decision on my part.
If they had asked me, they would have known there was a grand plan behind it. That by doing something so niche and so unique, I had a better chance of standing out and getting shelf-space in boutiques. Once I have a relationship with the boutiques, it’s going to be easier to get our clothing line in; rather than competing right off the bat with everyone else.
This isn’t to say, at all, that if you’re doing clothing, you’re not doing something niche. Niche can come down to the style of clothing you’re offering. But I do strongly believe that you have to STAND OUT, you have to offer something unique that the “big boys” aren’t already offering.
Getting the manufacturing process for our personalized blankets figured out was an incredibly lengthy and painful process. There is no such thing as “mass manufacturing” because each name has to have a unique placement on the blanket, based on size of letters and length of name. Not only that, but the blanket has to be assembled after the hand-applique is done, because it is backed and bordered with the same cotton print as the appliqued name. We can not buy a pre-made blanket and hand-applique because I would not be happy with the stitching showing through on the back.
The niche will pay off, and is paying off, because these products are really really unique. This is paying off in a lot of free press for us (without me pitching it yet) and the press is making it easy to get into boutiques. Not to mention building my confidence. And the plan is working, we’re now selling our graphic tees to boutiques who first purchased the blankets. We’ve built trust with them, and the unique, fabulous style is representative of our brand.
Consider what your niche is and focus on building that before spreading yourself too thin. Of course, you might have to experiment a little to figure out what your niche will be, but finding a niche will give you a fighting chance.
March 24th, 2007
It seems like I get so caught up in our manufacturing processes that I rarely touch on the online boutique startup process. Oh my, oh my. After we went through hell and got ripped off by developers -if anybody ever comes across Hand Crafted Webs or the Yellow-Llama, run fast and run far - they will rip you off. They can talk a good talk, but they don’t do anything to back it up. They can do a decent mock-up in Photoshop and get you thinking everything will be grand, but they won’t go beyond that. I will write this story completely in another post, because I’ve promised many people I would do so, and because I have a ton of emails to back it up; and because I know when I do my post on them, it will show up in searches and hopefully save many others.
Let me suffice it to say that their last email to me was requesting a contact address so they could send some legal papers to us; it’s been months and they are apparently incapable of performing a search online for our contact information, or simply locating the contact information provided on our website. I’d laugh if we hadn’t been totally and completely ripped off. But, right, the story is for another post. This is about getting the website up and running.
We were stuck with the crappy design that Hand Crafted Webs had left us with (they took our existing store offline and never got one back up, only a blog), out a lot of money, and felt really stuck-in-the-mud. My lessons that I learned were:
- Don’t depend too much on a referral, still do a thorough background check and review of current and past work.
- If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is (no matter how many times I’ve heard that, it took a real-life experience to fully “get it”).
- Be weary about working with foreign companies, where you’ll have little to no recourse if the deal goes sour.
So, how did we get our store up? My husband, and partner, did it himself. And once he was done with the store, he went back and re-designed the crappy blog-part and home page that we had been left with…we had heard from people that our site was difficult to navigate and it was difficult to shop. My husband finished a lot of the re-design this week and we’ve heard nothing but raves about how much better it is, how it’s now easy to shop, how it’s so much easier to tell what we do and who we are. So, I have to give my husband a zillion kudos for stepping up and taking on the task of learning HTML and PHP. He’s already amazing with graphics, but I’ve watched his graphic skills improve tenfold through the process as well.
Don’t get discouraged if it seems like it’s taking you forever to get your site up. I can tell you that if you are a designer or creative type, you’re likely to never be fully satisfied with the design. But your website should be a living document anyways, and so, keep in mind that you can keep making it better after you have it up and functioning.
Make sure you spec out the functions that you need currently and that you foresee in the future. Will you need the ability to offer wholesale prices and retail prices? Will you need the ability to shop by category, size, manufacturer, etc? how much design flexibility will you need? Will you need the ability to show multiple images for each product? Jot down every single thing you can think of that you want you website and users to be capable of, and then start researching designers and applications that will suit your needs.
In one of my upcoming posts I will talk about the value of a blog for an online boutique.
March 23rd, 2007
Good morning, good morning, good morning. Man, this has been a tough month for me (wait, is it only the middle of the month? yikes). And it all comes down to being disorganized. And then getting overwhelmed because I’m disorganized. Even yesterday, I lost yet another important paper. OK, OK, enough slaps in the face to get organized. I get it.
My how overwhelmed you can get as a small business owner. Sometimes it just feels like total insanity, like you’re going a hundred miles an hour and getting nowhere. There are so many things I want to do with, and for, the business and I think the hardest lesson for me to learn is all in due time.
I somehow need to take a step back and re-evaluate everything. Especially our marketing and advertising plan. I thought I had a plan, till I got into it and realized how much I don’t know about the whole thing. Now, I want to sit down and make a real plan, now that I’ve floundered around in the murky waters for awhile.
I do already know that I’m going to start though with 10 sales contacts a day. This can be touching base with existing customers, pitching new customers, dropping ad postcards in the mail, it doesn’t matter. But I need to make the 10 contacts a day. I need to focus specifically on getting customers, which means I need to chink away at the seven impressions it takes for someone to buy. And to do this, the marketing and advertising has to be very targeted and managed.
Right now, I feel like we’ve tried a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and really, it’s just too scattered in this big big world. Yes, we need to create a brand image, but we need to grow the brand through getting customers. I dropped a couple of display blankets in a very popular boutique yesterday and this exposure is going to be huge. Better than some random ads on some random kids sites.
So, at least now I feel like a woman with a mission. When I say it’s been a tough month, I’m not kidding. Tough business-wise and emotionally because of it. I’m so far into this business and here we are, finally launched and finally getting good press and finally getting business and I feel like crumbling. Because it isn’t as much business coming in as I would have liked by this time, and it’s stressful. But getting down to crumbling made me re-evaluate what’s going on and how much it comes down to me being reticent to go out and get the sales.
So, making 10 contacts a day, getting organized, and focusing on revenue-increasing activities ONLY during business hours is going to make a huge difference, and will put the pieces of Amber back together again.
March 18th, 2007
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