Welcome to Shop Talk, our (sort of) monthly series on our small business goals and accomplishments for our shop and this blog. We accidentally skipped doing this post in March (which maaaay have been because we didn’t really get anything on our to do list done…) so we’re doubling up this time.
In the February Shop Talk, we outlined our goals for March (which became our goals for March and April). Here’s what we said our goals were:
Getting our business license, getting our new blog launched, thrifting and antiquing, and finishing the new products we’ve planned. We’re also going to apply to a few craft fairs this month and are going to re-organize our shop storage space.
We did not even research the business license (we’ll get to it; we just know that we don’t have time for wholesale right now, so it isn’t a priority), we did a ton of thrifting and antiquing (which resulted in us getting a bunch of cool new stuff in the vintage section of the shop), and we finished one of our new products, but are still working on our next big release. We decided to only apply to one craft fair for the year (Renegade!), and the applications aren’t open until this month. And we did at least get started on reorganizing our shop storage space (which we call Etsy central).
Our biggest accomplishment in March was getting our new blog launched in our switch from Blogger to WordPress. A lot went into this in addition to the design and coding; we also had to import and categorize our archives and get the old blog to link to the new one. It was a labor of love, let us tell you.
On the product front, we launched Custom Initial Faux Bois Notebooks, which are made of real wood and come with a hand carved initials stamp! We love these books. I’ve just had a brilliant idea on how to use ours; now I can’t wait to fill it up!
We also changed the way that our record bookends are listed. You can now buy them by label color or you can mix ‘n match them by band. This should reduce the amount of e-mail questions about the musicians we have in stock!
Other awesome things we did in March/April:
Jake did the blog formatting and coding for a bunch of blogs designed by Freckled Nest: My Style Pill, Genevieve + Benjamin, Cream Puffs in Venice, and Treasure Chest Theory.
Jake also wrote a free RSS Feed Checker Plugin for WordPress users.
I finished the measurements and supply sampling for our next awesome handmade product. I’m almost ready to start making prototypes!
And the thing we’re most proud of: we’ve made over 100 new blog posts since switching over to the new blog mid-March. And that’s epic.
We feel pretty darn good about March and April.
Here’s what’s on the agenda for May:
See our other Shop Talk posts here.
P.S. We’re sponsoring Campfire Chic, My Girl Thursday, and Nearsighted Owl this month. Stop by, say hello, and check out our buttons on the sidebars of each of those awesome blogs! Also make sure you check in for Nerd Nest giveaways and/or guest posts!
