how could i have forgotten to tell you? how!? my new column on scoutie girl debuted last thursday, and today featured the second installment. pop on over and read them - you'll find me writing (each thursday morning) in a slightly less personal voice, but i think you'll see it's still the same old me you've grown to love.
ahem.
[ "exhausted laundress" cup cozy - available from laura bucci's oh-so-lovely shop ]
so, yesterday's was the brain version of this post. here today i've got the more emotional version.
truthtelling time again, folks. i'm freaking exhausted. i'm spread thinner than an old man's hair. and i can't seem to figure out how to be not-tired.
my husband's tired, too. so so tired. and stressed out, like me. and behind at work, like me.
and i know that he could really use my help. he could really do with a little slack-taking-up by yours truly. but i sometimes think that this business of mine is the honest-to-god-only-thing that is keeping me sane, even if it's making me so damned tired.
which is to say, hard as it is, i guess it's kind of worth it. and yet i still need to find a way to make it less, um, deadly? ulcerating? energy-sapping? all-consuming?
to this point, i think my business model has been a more model: make more things, introduce more products, get more exposure, explore more venues, sell more things, provide more services, repeat.
and so far, that has been a pretty decent business model for me. it has worked. it has helped me grow.
but the more model is limited in that it doesn't take into account that hours are not something you can't simply more your way into. the more model isn't a sustainable model, at least not the way i've been doing it.
i think the time has come where my more business model and my less philosophy have crashed headlong into one another.
it's like there's a venn diagram of possibility and the things i want just cannot all possibly overlap in the middle.
i want to be able to support my family and allow my husband to quit his government-lawyer job and hang up his own shingle (as they say in the biz). i want to be able to work and still enjoy my family life. i want to sustain my sanity and my health and the health of my household.
i want to grow my business. i want to have my things in stores that my friends and family can go to in their own cities and say, whoa! julie made this!
i want to do it all indie and in-house and organic and small.
but the way i'm going at it, instead of achieving all of these things, i'm going to end up achieving none of them. or maybe one.
the current model just isn't going to work. it's going to waste my resources and use up all my time and waste me completely. i'm exhausted already and it's my slow season. i'm rushing around trying to develop this new product and work with this existing client and open this new shop and develop this new business relationship and plan to exhibit at a trade show and work on a wholesale kit. i'm trying to print all my own stuff and bring in new wedding clients and expand my design repertoire and portfolio. the things i'm doing conflict with one another (i am planning to make a huge splash at the national stationery show, but at the same time i'm setting up this whole in-house printing studio. if i want to do it all here in-house, then why do i want to go to a trade show and court big wholesale accounts? and if i do want to get the wholesale accounts, how can i do that without going insane, alienating my family, and probably driving myself to drink?
the collision of ideas and practices and desires is about to become really apparent unless i figure out a different model.
there's a lot of talk among artists and creatives about competition and whether we should watch our competition and whatnot. the general consensus is do your thing and people will come to you. but i find that these moments of business crisis are the moments when i become most interested in my peers, my competitors, and other businesses. these are the times when i look around at all the folks around me doing sort of the same things i'm doing and i start to ask myself, "do i want to do it the way so-and-so is doing it?" it's not their products i'm thinking of but their model. their approach.
so now i'm curious: what businesses do you know of that seem to be achieving success on their own terms? what models do you see out there? what seems cool, what seems crazy, and what seems feasible?
i myself have been thinking a lot about knock knock and kelly rae roberts. the former has taken a really wonderfully creative idea and turned it into a fun, funny, crazysuccessful business. a big-ish business. the latter is an artist who has made herself a name (and a salary) by cultivating her art, keeping things small, and developing a devoted following. the value in her business is all about her - her art, her lessons, her experience.
they're two ends of a spectrum, i guess, but for me they're really informative. i find myself sitting here, though, wondering where on the spectrum i am now and where i'd like to be.
what do you think?
[ office space drawing - large keyboard study, for sale by heartsandlaserbeams on etsy ]
anyone out there in up up reader land who considers him- or herself a computer programmer, web developer, or php expert? leave me a comment or email me via the link at top right.
the *brand new* style of calendar is still in development, but because i have 72 calendar cases left from a replacement order last year, i went ahead and put together a 2011 version of the bestselling cd-case desk calendar.
all new illustrated patterns. all new color palette. it's a very different palette for me - kind of sweet in a way my stuff's usually not sweet, but with a few surprising color choices just to keep things interesting.
here's just a tiny preview of all 12 patterns. it'll be in both shops this week. there'll only be 72 available and when they're gone, they're gone. i hope i remember to set one aside for me this year.
[ bright idea whiteboard wall graphic, for sale by designomite on etsy ]
sometimes, i have so many ideas i feel like charlie and his grandpa after they drink the fizzy lifting drink and they keep getting closer to the fan on the ceiling. it's like good good good yay good and then whoa! what am i going to do?! make it stop?!
[ the lemonade stand, by a sense of place photography. for sale on etsy. ]
i want to come to you tonight with a lovely blog post. something inspiring, perhaps. something cheeky? ooh, maybe something useful. but every single ounce of ingenuity i have is being put to other use tonight, namely to the task of trying to stand back and objectively judge my e-commerce site.
last week i did a little self audit and discovered that 35% of my income comes from etsy, 32% from wedding clients, 30% from custom graphic design clients, and only 4% from my own e-commerce site even though i get a lot of traffic there.
and spend a significant chunk of my advertising budget (read: 100% of my advertising budget) on bringing people to the site.
needless to say i am insert-trite-adjective-describing-my-deflated-state-here.
my first reaction was to throw up my hands and say go screw, own e-comm site. who needs you and your ad-budget-sucking-powers, anyway? and just delete the whole thing and stop promoting it, redirecting people to my etsy site instead.
my next reaction was to throw up my hands and say maybe instead of attending the national stationery show next may, i should spent all of my remaining business budget to have someone build a custom e-commerce solution in the hopes that maybe-just-maybe building it will indeed make them come. but that's, um, stupid. (not that we say stupid in our house, mind you, because it's not e very nice word to say. and yes, i am now thinking of my three year old son who will not in fact be reading this blog post until he is old enough to fully understand that we do say stupid in this house sometimes.)
my third reaction was to sit here for an hour and a half and stare at my site and look around at my favorite stores and try to be objective about how to improve my own site without spending mega mucho.
so now i turn it over to you. i need your honest feedback. why do you think that visits aren't converting to sales in my shop when the same exact products are converting to sales on etsy. i'm getting traffic. i'm using the same images and descriptions. my custom site has features like drop-down options for each product, unlike etsy. but not many sales.
help a girl out?
apologies for my brief absence. it's not so much that i haven't been around as that my husband has been. he took this week off and i'm soaking it up - working a bit, playing a bit, doing some house stuff with him that we've been meaning to do. we're coming up on one year in this house and have yet to hang a single thing on the walls save in emily's room.
anyway, i interrupt this brief absence to tell you that now's the time to get thee over to the spring blog in order to enter for a chance to win some up up creative feelgood™ booty.
technically you have until monday, august 9, 2010 at noon est to leave your comment, but come on. you'll probably forget if you don't go do it now.
