My new business venture

 

 

 

 

 

I've been so quiet lately.   No blogging has gone on 'round these parts.  My poor almost nine-month-old doesn't even have his 7 month pictures on the blog yet!  It has been for good reason, though.  Number one, I have really invested in being in the Word.  I'm doing a Bible study with some gals {this one if anyone cares}.  

I also started a new business venture.

Yep, I did.  Me, the girl with a few failed business ventures under her belt started another one.  

*go ahead, roll your eyes*

I know, and it's why I have had my etsy open for a month and told pretty much no one.  There's a lot of embarrassment there for me.  I told my husband I was never going to tell anyone about the shop because I had shame about the fact that I just start and stop projects like it's nothing.  

That's not really the whole truth.  I tried to run a profitable blog.  It was never successful.  Then we know The Blue Swirl.  It was successful in that I got crazy overwhelmed and stressed out and ended up ruining sewing for myself.  It wasn't that it was such a raging success in general.  It was successful enough to overwhelm me because sewing took me away from my family.  I had to be in my sewing room and felt so separated from everyone.  And it took up a lot of space in my small house.  And there was a lot of upfront cost.  So much so, in fact, that I never actually made a profit.  Ever.  I lost money working my butt off.  Doesn't that suck when you look at it like that?  The profit margin is small in that industry (unless people will pay you $60 for a shirt) when you factor in materials/shipping/time.  

Anyway, long story short is basically this: I have an entrepreneurial spirit.  For as long as I can remember, I've wanted my own business.  For the longest time, I had plans of opening up a cloth diaper shop.  I even talked about it here years ago.  When push came to shove, it required too much upfront capital and we don't have the space in our house to store all those diapers.  So I gave up on it a long time ago, but I have pretty much daily contemplated what I could do instead.  

If you've followed my blog for awhile, you know how often I change my blog up.  Not since I moved to Wordpress (which I still dislike), but when I was on blogger I was constantly redoing my blog design.  Because I lo-o-o-ove designing blogs.  I love looking at blogs.  I love reading blogs.  When I ran TBS, I recognized the need for small business branding on a small-scale level.  I was never successful enough that I could pay someone $2000 to design me a blog and another $500+ to design matching business goods.  It just wasn't in the cards for myself.  

When my husband sent me away to a hotel for a night alone a little while back, I spent most of my time there redesigning an old blog (with the intentions of moving this one back to blogger).  All of a sudden it dawned on me, like a freaking pile of bricks right on my head: duh.  I know blogger.  I've been ninja-ing blogger and learning CSS and HTML for years now.  I don't think I'm too bad at it.  I absolutely 100% ADORE THE HECK OUT OF IT.  Like, could spend most of my waking minutes doing nothing but playing around with CSS and HTML and getting giddy over the results when OH-MY-GOSH-I-JUST-MADE-THAT-DO-THIS!  

So I thought…why not?  Why not just do it?  Design a few blog templates, put them on etsy and see what happens.  So I did.  A week went by and nothing.  I got discouraged but wasn't shocked.  I mean, it's not usually an "If you build it, they will come" kinda thing in reality.  I couldn't just stick a shop on etsy, not tell a soul and expect magical things to happen.  About a week and a half after opening, I got an order.  And then another.  And then another.  And then another.  And another.  And another one still.   All of a sudden, I was truly busy.  In a really good and enjoyable way.  It's a feeling I never had with The Blue Swirl.  My business stressed me out.  I loved the end results of seeing other people's children in clothes I made, but the actual making clothes thing?  Not that much.  

I spent 80% of the time I invested in my business just branding…and re-branding…and re-branding.  I spent a lot of time daydreaming about my packaging, re-designing my business cards/clothing tags.  It was almost insane.  If you know me, you might know I went to school for public relations/advertising.  My first and only "real" job was at a newspaper.  I started out as an account manager: I was the middle man between the client and the graphic designer.  I brainstormed the advertising strategies/sketched them out, the graphic designers used their magic to turn it into reality.  I loved the heck out of that, too.  When I started running all of this through my head, it just…made sense.  Branding/PR/advertising is my background.  It's what I went to school for.  It's what I enjoy so much.  I'm not a classically trained graphic designer who can fetch thousands of dollars from clients with thousands of dollars to spend.  But I can karate chop a blog template into shape and whip up a few matching items for those mamas + women who are small business owners and need branding for a small fee.  

Someone recently reminded me that in general, most successful business owners have a few failures under their belt.  Rather than shame, I am trying to focus on the fact that this one is a success, and that I've worked hard to get here and seen some lows.  It's all been a learning process.

I got "found out" today by a few friends who stumbled across my business facebook page, so I figured I should probably explain myself.  I also just celebrated my 50th sale a few minutes ago, so what better timing?  Without further ado, I give you: Bella Lulu Ink (I wish there was a cool story there, but basically I went through about 300 names with unavailable domains/already taken etsy shop names until I finally just started putting combinations of names I like together until I found one that wasn't taken) and the blog.  In a month, I have almost made as many sales as I did the entire time I ran The Blue Swirl.  For AN ACTUAL PROFIT, ya'll.  Something I could never do with all my energy, effort and money with The Blue Swirl.  And the most important thing is that I love it.  Every second of it.  This…is the stuff my dreams are made of.  

So OBVIOUSLY getting this blog moved back to blogger is a priority.  So is figuring out how to develop for Wordpress.  Hopefully one of these days I'll be able to make that happen!

Now that I've braved up + shared…would you help me out and spread the word?  I could really use some likes on my facebook page and some word-of-mouth.  Thank you for not laughing at me (okay, if you do, totally don't tell me).  :)