#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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Work is love made visible...

Work is love made visible...
I've got this poster over my fireplace. When I was writing scripts I mostly got what he meant but as mainly my thousands of words remained unseen, I was having trouble with the 'visible' part...
When I put down my pen and went back to bar work there was,sorry to say, very little love for the work I was doing, save for the people I was doing it with and a handful of lovely customers.

My love affair with vintage fabric began with lusting at pictures of the beautiful patterns and colours on Ebay & Pinterest, occasionally splashing out on a must own piece and picking up random bits at car boot sales.
It turned into a full blown torrid affair when I bought the campervan last spring and decided I would do all the re upholstery myself.The process of making soft furnishings and collecting beautiful bits to use whilst camping set off an unexpected bonfire in my heart. I didn't have a clue back then that, a year later, I would have bought myself a sewing machine and hung up my bar towel for good (please) and decided to make good on Kahlil's wise words.

Being a single parent is a tough call but occasionally I get to reap the benefit,literally in this case, as the government are running a scheme for people on low incomes to start their own business-  https://www.gov.uk/new-enterprise-allowance- so for the last six weeks I have been working with the team at Erewash partnership to put together an application for the NEA scheme which offers funding and support for the first six months of your business start up.
The funding is by no means a given and in my case, as the business is only part time initially,there is some doubt as to whether I will actually qualify financially, but the funding aside, I have been working with a brilliant mentor to produce a business and financial plan for the year ahead.

 All I had, as I went into the very first meeting, was a vague idea that I wanted to refashion vintage and salvaged fabric into other items, mostly camper van related;storage holders,cushions,curtains and such like.Thanks to the requirements of the scheme I have battled,refined and honed my hazy ideas by doing tons of research for my business plan and have watched my little acorn start to put down roots. Today I'm upcycling fabric finds to sell on Ebay, next year I'm aiming for an online one stop festival shop using re and up cycled materials and selling other ethically sourced goods, the year after that I'm taking on the world...

I'll admit that the financial spreadsheet was a nail biting test of my pathetic maths skills. (Thank you Andrea Thomas, my unofficial accountant.) Nothing is more terrifying than looking at all your in and outgoings in black and white and realising that you've got some serious sewing ahead of you if you're going to keep your children in shoes...

"This aint gonna be easy...You gotta put it in..."  Kelly Rowland wisely sung in the aptly titled  "Work" and how right she was.Since I decided that I was setting up my own business I've been a full blown recluse. (Apologies to all my long lost friends that I've ghosted since Christmas.) I'm only three months in and I've all ready realised that being the boss is a 24-7 job, I even dream about things I could be making. Any time spent away from my laptop and sewing machine is always tinged with niggling guilt. I worked Saturday nights at the pub for three years,now my new found weekend freedom entails sitting at my desk doing embroidery....and yet somehow,despite the lack of social life,the 3am panic attacks about gas bills and the crippling doubt that no one else likes my style, I am happy,happier in fact than I've been in years,I bounce out of bed, work my ass off then I fall into an exhausted sleep and do it happily again and again because each time I reach into my sewing box with an idea, pull out a beautiful bit of fabric and turn it into something tangible I finally get what Kahlil Gibran means. 


 Wilds and Free

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