I recently returned from a 6-month sabbatical/stay with my long distance boyfriend in England!
Due to the nature of my shop it's pretty much gone into a hibernation while I was away living life with the boo, so this summer's my chance to bring it back up to speed (and hopefully faster!) for Holiday 2014.
Business Goals:
Continue work on Shop Branding
--I feel my shop's one weakness right now is a brand that isn't quite tied down enough. I will have to go into details later with a proposed plan to fix this, but here's the big-name goal for that for this month. Branding!
Re-establish shipping/marketing workflow
--I appreciate my family's help shipping things while I was gone, but now I don't know where my things are anymore! This looks like a good opportunity to take a good look at my shipping workflow to find ways I can work more efficiently.
Set-up better storage for yarn and products
--This is sort of low priority. As much as I'd like a better looking/working storage system, I do understand what I have is fine. Also most of the problem here is that I could not stop knitting more products for the shop in an effort to make as much of the work ready-to-ship as I possibly can! Maybe the remedy is to just have less inventory on-hand. (A new set of shelves would be nice though..) Which brings me to the next important goal:
Stop making, start selling!
--This is from a guide I read late last night by JJMFinance:
"Inventory is often where thousands of dollars of cash and profits are held. it is clearly a driver of your Etsy shop’s future success or failure. If you don’t have something to sell, you can’t make money. If you have too much to sell, but no one is buying it--you have profits and cash that are not liquid. Illiquid inventory often times kills many an Etsy shop."
Knitting takes a whole lot of time to do, so I always thought it was the best idea to make use of every spare minute I had to make something that could be sold. I have reached a point, though where it might be safe to say that I have enough (about 89 things are listed in my shop right now, but I can safely say I have over 400 knits finished in my bins--many being 'premade' color choices for some of the customs..with one-of-a-kind items yet to be listed sitting to be photographed)!
So it's a good time to start switching gears and focus on...wait for it..
Marketing, offline venues
--I've been posting pretty faithfully with spiritedly on facebook, instagram, and on the blog. But giving myself some sort of structure can only help.
There's also the opportunity of finding craft fairs and the like to attend! I had my taste of it last year with 2 local shows, and while it was a great challenge to be all alone to carry my stuff and be on my feet all day, it was a rush to meet people who seemed as excited about my crafts as I am every day! It was like, FINALLY! You get it! Here! Isn't this stitch pattern just fantastic? And it's perfectly warm too, try it!
It's tiring to find fairs that are within my budget and don't require things like a canopy to be able to attend(also out of budget), but I'm still always keeping an eye out.
Now that this is all laid out I'm a little intimidated here, so the logical next step would be to set up attainable and measurable plans for each of these points. I'll try to get that going before the end of the month so I can start July off strong and with purpose. :]
