Built to last

This week the business is six months old and I am now officially standing on my own two feet financially...gulp.This knowledge simultaneously sends me into a huge panic and makes me proud at how much I've achieved in those months.
Starting a business has been the steepest learning curve, much like having your first baby,you have to learn to adapt every day as your baby/business grows and takes on different needs,I've also had a lot of sleepless nights worrying about being the only bread winner.The nature of the business has shifted as I've learned what sells and where my passions lie.As it turns out I would really like to go back to university and study textile design but day dreams aside (Still not paid off my last student loans) I have bought myself a 2nd hand Mac and am on the long,very confusing road of teaching myself from tutorials, with the aim to eventually master surface pattern design and do something with my handwriting skills...

Dealing in vintage turned out to be a perilous path...At points I couldn't bring myself to go to a car boot sale ...I know...Purely because all the fun was being sucked out of looking for vintage when you're thinking about it's resale value all the time. My contract ends at the lovely Design@44 this weekend :( and I'm considering the next best move. I have really enjoyed having a retail space that I can make look pretty but although I sold a fair few bits and pieces it wasn't enough to make profit.No discredit to the shop,vintage is a niche market and it's finding the right retail outlet. Bunting Workshop and I are doing a stall at the Derby Christmas night market on the 17th of November so come along and say hello.

One thing that I have discovered in my vintage dealings is how much better made things were back in the day.I can almost date things now by the materials and workmanship involved in the item and you can clearly see that as soon as China got involved, how products quickly became mass produced using cheap materials with minimal workmanship and craft. 

I bought some vintage Christmas decorations at the weekend...which I may have mentioned once or twice...There were decorations in the box going back to the 1950s ...beautiful glass hand painted fairy lights and a Christmas fairy with jointed arms and original mercury glass baubles that were all testament to when things were made to last,when we treasured our belongings because we didn't have the mindset of new new new every year.

I raged a while ago about Ikea ...Deemed revolutionary in its day admittedly, now it just fuels the throw away culture we seem to have adopted.If I go to the Tip I want to climb in the bins after things I can see that could be reused and upcycled and it saddens me that we are filling the earth full of waste when it's so unnecessary.

Why have we let new become better when clearly things were made so much better in the last century? The tiny detail in some of those Christmas decorations speak of pride in the job and care in the design and that attitude is my inspiration for moving forward with the business.

Good things take time to create and when I'm panicky about my income, I will remember that at six months old babies can't even walk...

#girlboss

So here we are,officially in business...I have a letter from the Tax office with my company name on it & everything...The fact that I can't actually log in to my account because I've lost my reference number, I am blaming on the Admin assistant/ Marketing manager/ Senior Seamstress/Sales Rep/Head buyer and Tea girl,errr, Me.It's no wonder I couldn't see where I'd put it from under all those hats...

Thank God then (and my sister who bought it for me) for #Girlboss by NastyGal founder Sophia Amoruso (http://www.nastygal.com/) which is kicking my ass through the first few weeks of being the boss of me. I won't spoil her story too much with details but from one girl going out on an Ebay wing and a prayer, to another, she is inspiring me at every page turn.

I'm a single parent, which is a confusing curse and blessing. If I don't make any money I can't rely on another income to pay the bills, which in turn gets me out of bed at 4am to get stuff done and fuels my determination to make my business succeed. One of the many reasons I want to be own #girlboss is so that I can work flexibly to be there for my kids.Another is to stand by the life lessons I am trying to teach them,that you can do anything you want, if you work hard at it.

Three weeks into selling and I've had one good sales week and two of the 'Beans for tea' kind but thanks to Sophia I refuse to be phased. I knew from the start that this was going to be the steepest learning curve since realising babies don't come with a guidebook...and I need to heed her sage wisdom that, " When your goal is to gain experience,perspective and knowledge, failure is no longer a possibility."

She advises that when an item doesn't sell, it's not because of the item ( My mantra is if you don't love it, don't sell it in the first place) but how you've gone about marketing it and I know that that's the hat I'm least comfortable in (though clearly the admin hat needs a jauntier angle too.)
Sewing machine wins over self promotion every time but I 'm going to have to put my fabric away and get busy with my sales pitch. Suggestions welcome.

There are moments of doubt,I'm only human and a stupidly sensitive one at that but I'm learning  to tell those niggles to shut the hell up. I've never done most of those jobs before,it would be arrogant to assume I can nail all of them from the off.

I took a rare day off this week to have a huge sort out (before I lost one the children in the piles of stock) & to actually get out the house. Something about driving always lends my brain to serious thought,the kids joke about the conversations we end up having, I find it's a perfect time to enlighten them, as they can't walk away from me...

So I'm musing on how to move forward with the business and trying to silence those asforementioned doubts when I had a problem with my truck and I pulled into Kwikfit in Heanor and the mechanic was a girl. I've been driving 20 years and trust me, I've frequented a lot of garages, but I have never met a female mechanic before, I'm sure she's not the only one but it didn't stop me gushing over her like she was the second coming. Afterwards I wondered if it was conversely sexist to comment on the fact, after all why shouldn't a woman be a mechanic? but whatever the politically correct reaction would have been, I knew she was a sign to ignore the odds and as Sophia puts it ,"Difficult doesn't mean impossible and out of the bajillion things in this universe that you can't control,what you can is how hard you try."

I best crack on then...

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