:: lightness and raspberries ::

sometimes thishereblog gets heavy. not like dude, you're blowing my mind heavy. and not testicular-cancer-diagnosis heavy. (which would be heavy indeed since last i checked i'm a girl). just think think thinking kind of heavy.

and so i'm here tonight with some things that make me feel light.

like discovering that bolthouse farms has a juice that i actually love. it is apple juice free, which is like a miracle among miracles because if you've ever read the ingredients list on any of those beautiful, colorful juices by bolthouse or naked or any of those companies, every single one of them contains apple juice, which my non-apple-juice-liking mouth seems to seek out like fleas seek out mangy dogs. it can be the last ingredient and i can be blindfolded and there can be berry fireworks happening in the mouths of normal people but all my berry fireworks are extinguished by apple juice.

so mango lemonade is making me feel light.

and so are raspberries grown in my backyard, picked and eaten straight off the bush (or collected in a bowl when the bush is very very giving). sun-warm raspberries.

and so is the wonderful response i've gotten to my recent blog posts. most of y'all tend to reply to my business-y quandry posts in private, which i find funny since i'm out here practically screaming about my business indecision and development, but which i totally get and love. your emails and messages make me smile and give me stuff to think about and help me find answers.

anyway, right now my kids and husband are out chasing hot air balloons (i swear!) so i'm going to take all this lightness and go do a bit of work and a lot of relaxing.

:: gaining entry has its costs ::

dear friends and readers, i'm here to bounce some things off you.

ready?

okay, go.

so. there's this little thing called a wedding book. some people call it a wedding album but that confuses me because my wedding album has pictures of me and brian in it, and my wedding book is like a catalog of all my wedding designs, all bound neat and nice.

anyway.

the idea of a wedding book is this:

1. invitation designer creates wedding book.
2. invitation designer sells this wedding book to retail paper shops around the country (maybe the world!!)
3. the purchase of this wedding book entitles the retail paper shop to basically be a distributor of invitation designer's invitations. 
4. retail paper shop pays the invitation designer just wholesale prices for the invitations ordered but charges the consumer full price. in other words, retail paper shop gets a 50% commission for being the one to do all the selling work, etc.
5. invitation designer fulfills the orders, shipping invitations back to the shop or directly to the consumer.

i debuted my wedding book at NSS and got hearty interest but no purchases (yet?) because i was only offering a 40/60 split (40% commission to the retail paper shop).

so that's the story of wedding books. here's the story of my 40/60 split:

if you're the kind of person (and oh, i'm the kind of person) who wants to sell direct-to-consumers in addition to selling through a retail paper shop, it's not really going to fly if you charge your retail customers one price and the retail paper shop charges their retail customers another price. why would a shop want to invest in my wedding book if they know their own customers can find me on the internet and bypass them altogether, saving a wad of cash in the meantime.

so when i decided to debut a wedding book, i had to raise my prices.

previously, my prices had been set based on the cost of production plus overhead plus my time, paid at a reasonable hourly rate for a graphic designer with some experience under her belt.

there was no cushion added in to allow, say, giving half of the price of each invitation to someone else.

but doubling my prices was just too much. i couldn't do it. it didn't seem justified by the market, it didn't seem fair to my clients, etc.

so instead i raised them about 16% (instead of 100%) and kept the commission at 40% instead of 50% and just hoped that introducing the wedding book would bring in enough extra customers to make it worthwhile that i was basically giving myself a major pay cut on any future wedding-book-generated sales (while giving myself a 16% pay raise on any direct-to-consumer invitation sales).

in the weeks since NSS, with feedback from retail shops regarding the 40/60 split, i've been staring down what seems like the longest corridor ever constructed, and at the end of that long, long corridor are two doors: one says wedding book, one says no wedding book.

i've started and stopped many times along the way, sometimes turning back to where i started, because i don't know which door to walk through when i get to the end of the hallway. in order to walk through the one marked wedding book, more price hikes will be required, for the price of admission to that club is pretty steep.

what's hard is that i don't really know what it will be like on the other side of that door. i don't know if i'll like being in the club and i'm afraid that if i raise my prices enough to get in there, my friends over in no wedding book will stop liking me and i'll end up not making enough money to pay the bills.

at the same time, i sort of want to be in the wedding book club because being there seems cool (if i think about my heroes in the biz, they're all card-carrying members). plus, when you're in, someone else does the selling for you. think about it, because it's pretty major. you still get to do the design and the production, you still get paid, but wow. the only people you have to sell to are the retail paper shop owners. it's an enticing proposition.

but seriously, friends, it's a dilemma for me, because if i really want to gain entry into the wedding book room, i'm going to need to do some major price raising. and i'm not sure that's going to work. i'm not sure the market can sustain that. i worry that i'll be pricing myself above even the other people already in the wedding book room.

i can't decide if i'm having a crisis of faith (faith that if i raise my prices, the customers will still want me) or if i'm just overall turned off by the idea of raising my prices enough to accommodate a 50% commission to someone else.

and if it's the latter, well, then that gives me even more pause because then what the hell did i just go to NSS for??

so now it's your turn. tell me what i'm thinking. show me what you see in my words here that i don't see. what am i afraid of? what shall i do?

:: logo re-work ::

after the NSS, you may or may not remember, i was feeling a little existential angst. to quote myself,

i identify so much more with the artists and artisans than i do with anyone else in my industry. every time a buyer admired the color and quality of one of my cards or posters and asked me whether they were letterpress printed or screenprinted and i told them they were printed digitally (in my studio, i sometimes added, though i knew that this sounded small-fry instead of artisanal), the part of me that knew what that sounded like to them just wanted to cringe. and then run out and buy a press or some screens and lend my work the credibility it apparently needs. that i apparently need. i have a very "i made this with my own two hands" ethic to my business but i think i'm always just the smallest bit plagued by the fact that ultimately, everything i make comes from my printer. i really noticed this at the show more than i ever have elsewhere. it's hard to highlight what i feel is a key element to what makes up up creative unique -- the fact that everything (except for the wrapping paper) really is printed in house much like a letterpress shop or a screenprinting shop -- when to most people digital printing is basically at the bottom of the printer's foodchain, even below offset. this is something i think i'm going to have to deal with one way or another during the next year, managing my own perceptions and managing others' perceptions.

my first step in ameliorating the angst has been just a very minor shift in how i describe my business. while "eco-friendly and 100% sap-free" is a very apt tag line for my business, it's not helping me convey the things i'd most like to convey about my business. it doesn't really explain what i do.

"design & print studio," on the other hand, seems to situate me a little bit better among the hordes of screaming stationers out there. it puts it out there that i'm an indie shop (just a little "studio" - doing design & print work); and i like how the word "studio" connotes something a but more artisanal.

to go with the new tagline, i've worked up a few new logo possibilitles. i'm striving for something that represents how i see my design work: clean, crisp, minimalist, and modern but with a certain quiet beauty, maybe a little play between masculine and feminine. i'm also striving to show off some pretty typefaces since fonts are a big part of what i do.

i'm eager for your feedback. what do you think of these 6 logo prototypes? leave me your:

(a) critiques
(b) praise
(c) favorites
(d) suggestions

please and thank you.

:: deep thoughts, by up up creative ::

in the kinds of circles i run in (which is to say among indie entrepreneurs, makers, etc.), eventually there ends up being a bunch of talk about how hard it is to reconcile yourself to the fact that you're usually not your target customer. often, you're not even close. after all, the person who can sew an amazing modern quilt need not purchase an amazing modern quilt. the shoemaker need not buy shoes.

this is the most difficult for me to square myself to with respect to my flourishing wedding business.

the wedding stuff is fun for me. i love working with wedding clients because i know how to make them happy, and they're so good at being happy when planning a wedding is so hard and i've made one part easier. i like playing that role. i like helping them feel sane. i like giving them the exact design they want and helping them remember that while tradition and etiquette matter because they can help convey information, the fact is they're inviting their closest friends and family members to the event and it's okay to show off some personality.

i also really like making the invitations gorgeous. luxurious. i love nothing more than a really thick, 100% cotton paper paired with euro-style envelopes. i am a total sucker for letterpress. for real. swoon, swoon, swoon.

not that i ever in a billion years would have had that at my own wedding. i made our invitations and they kicked ass and they were so not something you could find anywhere online and they were so not luxurious in that high-end luxe kind of way. i got my materials at places like staples (resume paper) and michael's (cardstock) and i printed them through swear word after swear word on my tiny little at-home-use-it-to-print-your-homework inkjet printer. i designed them in (gasp!) microsoft word and publisher.

which is to say that sometimes i find it hard to like my work. or maybe not hard, but confusing. sometimes i think, "geez, i should be designing for someone like me, someone with a DIY-type budget and a DIY-type frame of mind." except someone like me would make them herself.

i have proof.

but still that's weird. it makes things like pricing hard. and even marketing. i think that sometimes i direct my business at one kind of customer when the customer who most wants to buy my things is a different person entirely.

so what, then, is the me in all of this? and if there comes a point at which i stray too far from my center, from my me-point in the business, will i know it? will red flags go up? should they?

brian always used to say things to me like, "if i ever dress like fill-in-the-blank, please tell me to stop" and i'd always respond by saying, "but brian, if you start dressing like that it'll be because you've changed into the person who wants to dress like that." he never ever liked that answer, and it's only when i get all business-thinky that i really understand why. while there's something to be said for changing and growing, there's some part of all of us that wants to believe that certain things should never change, and that if they change without us noticing, someone should gently direct us back onto the right track.

deep down, though, i think i still stand with my first answer. if you change, even if it's without noticing the change, you probably wanted to. so maybe it's not the original desire (that first self) we need to cling to but rather the ability to let ourselves change as our desires change. to become new selves (and businesses).

worry not, dear friends. up up creative's not going anywhere. please don't read into my philosophizing. sometimes some little thing will get me started (today it was the thought, "i really want to shift my house paper towards something heavier") and then i think i'm going to sit down to write a really basic "whaddaya think?" kind of a post and then this whole soul-search-monstrosity of a post comes out of me.

i'm nothing if not introspective. it's probably what made me a good graduate student, my willingness to take a question as far as i can. but it's also what made me a bad one. it is far too easy for me to follow questions on forever, until they lose all relevance and meaning.

i try not to do that here. i'm not sure if i succeed, exactly, but i feel like the asking here is at least worthwhile. i feel like it helps me, and i hear from you, dearest readers of thishereblog, that it helps you sometimes.

and so i shall keep asking.

lend me your answers from time to time?

:: birthday invitations for the boy ::

evan's turning four, and this year we told him he could have four invitations to hand-deliver to the four friends he wanted to invite to the party (when he's five, he'll get five). a digital version went out to our families, but evan was so delighted to have actual mail in his hands.

or, rather, in his backpack. that's where he put each invitation (he calls them, quite appropriately, informations as in, "i've got ruby's information in my backpack"). when possible, he delivered them via red bike with that backpack strapped to his narrow little shoulders.

"it even stays on while i'm riding my bike!" he was heard exclaiming, and "when i grow up i am going to do this on the weekends, ride my bike with my backpack on. do you ever do that on the weekends, mommy?"

alas, no. not often anymore.

and of course in terms of printing these for him i went all out. i like to imagine that after we left each invitation with its recipient, it went down something like this:

"wow. i think evan's mommy used 100% cotton paper."

"and what's the font? it looks like futura but not quite? maybe like a small caps version or something? a little bold? very nice. i wish you could make informations like this for me, mommy, like evan's mommy does."

that's what i'd be thinking anyway.

:: p.s. ::

this is what happens when mommy cleans up that tiny red headed child and releases her from the booster seat but then continues to write that blog post. she's a sneaky one, that emily. didn't even think she could reach that box on the table.

:: in which i go on and on about my awesomeness ::

across the table from me, a tiny red headed child is shouting into her empty fruit bowl, so excuse me if this blog post is any of the following:

• confusing
• disjointed
• juvenile
• sticky (from the fruit)

once snack time is over we're headed into the playroom to "play" (by which i mean emily is going to play and i am going to surreptitiously remove toys from the toy bins (some toys destined for storage to be brought out again later to much delight, some toys destined for donation to be used for the delighting of stranger-kids) because it is getting insane in there and brother's at school and emily is a far less vigilant mom watcher than her big brother.

i'm just popping in to say hi and thanks for all your comments on the last post. i found the responses (both private and in the form of comments on the post) to be surprising. some folks thought i was being tough on myself and i so totally didn't see it that way or intend it to be that way. i guess i just wanted to explain my silence around here and also, probably more than that, attempt in some convoluted way to break the silence.

if i haven't said it, i'll say it now: i think i'm doing a pretty awesome job building this business. i'm proud of myself and proud of the business and i think i'm doing okay at handling the continual dual-tug of family and work. i mean, i could certainly use a break, but who couldn't?

but despite how awesome i think i'm doing with all of this, or i guess probably because of how awesome i feel things are going, i'm frustrated. frustrated that my family financial situation is so sucky. frustrated that i have goals i want to achieve that i feel like i need to hold off on to focus more on the daily-grind of things. frustrated that i am still in my attic.

the frustration is what fuels the awesomeness. it sucks, but it's true. i build this thing day by day, bit by bit, because i'm frustrated.

so that's that. and yeah, i think i'm back now. i think i've broken the blogging silence.

off to sneak toys away from my children now. over and out.

:: metaphors and mentors ::

how's this for irony:

that i cannot find the right word to explain how i'm feeling lately is exactly the right way to describe it. i am feeling like a concept without a name. like a definition without a word. like a list of ingredients without a recipe.

i put all of my time and effort and energy and thought into prepping for NSS and now that it's over and i'm swimming through its wake and crawling back to shore i feel a bit like i've got a whole wide open world ahead of me and just a pinhole to look at it through. or maybe that's not right. maybe the better way to explain it is to say i feel like now i'm looking out into the distance and like some kind of strange escher drawing there are shifting and competing vanishing points.

i made a list last night of all the roles i play in my business and all of the products i make or have recently made. the list is really, truly, terribly long. it is the list of the do-it-herself entrepreneur who has no employees, no investors, and no outright plan. the list of the small business owner who wants to grow her business for the future but who needs it to sustain her (financially, perhaps emotionally, though that's a post for a different day) in the present.

that's a hard person to be. it's like being a single parent to fourteen kids.

it's the "now and in the future" part that's the hardest for me. there are choices i'd like to make for my business and my family (sometimes i find it hard to talk about them as separate entities because each decision i make affects both, because each hour of my day is an hour spent pulled between two magnetic norths) that are the best choices for the present, and there are choices i'd like to make for my business and my family that are the best choices for the future.

these choices, dear reader, are not the same choices. i struggle to find ways to wrangle them into points of intersection. to shape them into recipes. definitions. words.

which is funny because i'm also finding it harder and harder to talk. just to talk, like in general. i'm less conversational. i'm less think-out-loudish.

there's something about being this person with all these different roles running this growing business that just makes me feel like keeping it all to myself. like somehow talking about it, discussing it, critiquing it, makes it less mine. or perhaps makes the success of it less mine.

but then there's that thing i was talking about before, the thing where sometimes i can't separate my business from my not-business, and so talking about other things is getting harder, too. questions are piling up all around me, on top of me, tangling themselves in my hair, sliding in under my feet, and i feel like i just want the time and space to pick each one off my like a tick, hold it in my fingers for a moment, maybe look at it under a microscope, and then pinch it dead. it's a strange job to want to do oneself and i realize that it would be a job more effectively accomplished by more than one person, but i'm stubborn. something very deep down inside me is stubborn.

i get it now, though, things like therapy. coaches. impersonal advisors. even mentors. i get it that sometimes it seems easier to turn to someone who is neither related to nor affected by your decisions. someone to whom you can hand just one or two ticks. someone who can help you write a recipe or form a word.

or maybe you don't need a therapist, you just need a blog.

:: NSS 2011 - the recap edition ::

NSS 2011, a set on flickr. you can click through to see any (or all) of the images at full size.

so, the thing about the stationery show is this: people can ask and ask how it went but i won't really be able to answer that question for awhile. it's not like, say, mowing the lawn, where you start at one end of the yard and you stop at the other end and when you're done the grass is shorter. it's more like inventing a new kind of anti-fertilizer that seeps slowly into the ground and then works on changing the molecular structure of the grass roots so that the grass continues to be healthy and generally productive of oxygen and such, but it doesn't actually grow as tall as quickly.

whether or not your anti-fertilizer works is going to take some time to determine, and even once you determine its effectiveness at slowing the rate of growth of your grass, you might not even know why.

so the general sum-up is this: it felt good being there. i'm already eagerly thinking about next year. i surpassed most of my goals, but i didn't make much actual money. in fact, i didn't even come close to paying for the trip.

yet.

but my mixture has been added to the soil and i do hope to see some results in the coming months. interest was high and people were surprisingly willing to part with their business cards (though i did get my fair share of "actually, i ran out" and "i got on the plane without any by mistake" fibs).

i'd say the things i certainly got out of the show were these:

- i was pleased to discover that i felt like i fit in there -- like i knew generally what i was doing and could answer buyers' questions and speak the lingo and basically hold my own

- it felt so good to meet other people in the biz -- both people i had known online for years and people i just met there at the show. i really really liked making new friends and in fact left feeling quite sad that i don't get to spend more time working side-by-side with these people.

- along those lines, i identify so much more with the artists and artisans than i do with anyone else in my industry. every time a buyer admired the color and quality of one of my cards or posters and asked me whether they were letterpress printed or screenprinted and i told them they were printed digitally (in my studio, i sometimes added, though i knew that this sounded small-fry instead of artisinal), the part of me that knew what that sounded like to them just wanted to cringe. and then run out and buy a press or some screens and lend my work the credibility it apparently needs. that i apparently need. i have a very "i made this with my own two hands" ethic to my business but i think i'm always just the smallest bit plagued by the fact that ultimately, everything i make comes from my printer. i really noticed this at the show more than i ever have elsewhere. it's hard to highlight what i feel is a key element to what makes up up creative unique -- the fact that everything (except for the wrapping paper) really is printed in house much like a letterpress shop or a screenprinting shop -- when to most people digital printing is basically at the bottom of the printer's foodchain, even below offset. this is something i think i'm going to have to deal with one way or another during the next year, managing my own perceptions and managing others' perceptions.

- talking with some folks who have been in business a good deal longer than i have, and who are starting to have a lot more success, it was sototallyandcompletely clear to me that i really want to grow my business. i want to have a building. i want to have employees. but i want to keep the making part of things in-house.

- i really need these stupid bangs to grow faster. i got 'em cut a few months ago in a wild, heated moment thinking, "hey! i'll be sporting these really awesome bangs for the stationery show!" but then i never could get them how i wanted them and i cut them even shorter and then finally just decided to let the little f'ers grow, so at the show they were constantly flopping down into my eyes and generally causing me malaise. plus now every single time i look at a picture from the show i'm going to be reminded of my ridiculously ill-planned bang-cutting experiment. meh.

- i felt like i would have had a more effective show (and written more orders) if i had had a lot fewer things. over the years i've worked hard to diversify the up up creative offerings, adding new calendar designs, bringing in wrapping paper, developing the wedding side of things, creating new greeting cards and stationery sets. but at the show, maybe because it was my debut, i felt like this was a hindrance. i felt like many buyers looked in and thought "i don't easily know how to classify this booth and i don't know how to find the one specific thing i'm looking for." several times it took one of us mentioning the wedding invitations or maybe the calendars for someone to say, "oh! you have invitations? you have calendars? perfect!" things were clearly labeled and organized within the booth, but for buyers walking quickly down the aisle trying to decide whether or not to make the detour into my booth or continue easily and effortlessly toward the next booth they recognized, there was definitely a bit more question mark in the booth than period.

i'm feeling a little bit question marked myself now, actually. but in a good way. in that first graded grad-school paper kind of way. that "okay, this is going to be a whole new game and i'm going to have to figure out how to play it" kind of way.

to which i only have this to say:

game on.