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...

There's no place like home...

Working with the great British public presents it's unique challenges and believe me,after 20 years of customer service, I've pretty much dealt with them all from being groped while carrying a full tray of glasses, being spat at after refusing to serve a drunk customer, being stuck with a £60 bill after my table legged it without paying and cleaning up more alcohol laden puke than I care to think about... so it is with great joy that travelling to work these days only involves going down the stairs and turning right out of the kitchen to spend the day with myself.

My studio AKA the dining room is tucked away at the back of the house with no distractions...or so I thought smugly as I hung up my serving cloth for the last time and embarked on starting my own business,working from home. I'm now 5 months into this crazy venture and every day is a huge learning curve and hanging out in the dining room now has a very different purpose.

I'm not complaining,I was so ready for a new challenge. Quite frankly it's a miracle I hadn't all ready spontaneously combusted whilst polishing my millionth piece of cutlery. In retrospect throwing myself in at the deep end of being my own boss was possibly the act of a desperate woman but,like motherhood,it's probably not something you'd actually do if you only looked at it in black and white, which goes to prove this Cheryl Strayed quote correct.Those shitty waitressing jobs did add up to something, they gave me the drive to go out and work doing something that I actually love and that fit's in with the ever increasing demands of my life.

So I get to my desk/dining room table by 9am,5 days a week then all hours of the weekend too .I'm ever increasingly surrounded by piles of bright fabric, all begging me to make something, and random vintage items that I really want to keep but have to sell.
 It's a weird midcentury cornucopia of work & love,I couldn't ask for more inspirational eye candy, although I fear the imminent toppling of my vintage suitcase tower...up to 8 this week,its like a game of retro Jenga when I want to find something in the bottom one.

  

This week however things have been quiet and  I've been going a bit stir crazy stuck in the studioslashdiningroom and have been wandering away from my desk a fair bit. If I make it out of the kitchen I don't seem to find my way back.The hall needs hoovering, there's a pile of washing,grass needs cutting & when is the last time I changed the beds? Housework jumps out at you with every diversion from your desk and it's easy to get distracted.

 After wasting away a good hour touching up the chipped paint on the stairs...with Hammerite    ( It's not even like there was a tin of gloss beseeching me from the shed)  I have realised that getting the motivation is one thing,keeping it is another,especially when sales are sluggish and Ebay send you a whopping bill for all your hard work...

Staying inspired when the chips are down is to be another challenge on this learning curve so I've had a word with myself and spent the day away from the sewing machine.I finally used the accounting software I'd enthusiastically signed up for, then studiously ignored, watched some how to succeed on Ebay videos on You Tube then decided I'd write this blog about procrastination whilst blatantly procrastinating...My multi tasking is getting awesome ;)

And as an ironic joyful consequence I've sold two things while I've been blethering onto you so maybe a little break from bossing myself around is no bad thing...

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#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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