All Over, Red Rover

I've told a few people privately, but here's the public announcement. I'm winding up Waggle-Wee Kids. It's not going to happen immediately, (because I have the site paid for for a while!) but I'm going to start sales or start using some of the stock myself (yes, my daughter needs some new nappies). And there are some things like ProCare and bamboo velour that I will continue to supply - they're hard to get, but don't take me effort to make up and have as stock.

So what I wanted to talk about here are some of my reasons.

The main one comes down to moving on. I started designing nappies for a reason, I couldn't get ones to fit my first daughter. I enjoyed developing the new side-snap design, but when I came to time to test it and start producing it the fun wasn't there. My little one is toilet aware, we won't be using nappies for more than another year or so, so my interests have moved on and I want to sew things for my girls.

Which is where we come to the second reason, time. There are lots of different elements that go into running a business of this type, I can identify at least four.

• Stock production - yes, it takes a long time to sew a nappy. And if you don't produce your own you have your own set of problems - finding suppliers, ordering stock, keeping track of levels, differentiating yourself from your competitors, ...
• Packaging and posting - It doesn't sound like much, but it does take time to pull an order together, check it all and send it out.
• Store maintenance - again, this actually takes a long time. To photograph your stock, clip, crop and otherwise pretty-up the pictures, to load them, to write the descriptions, if you have 20 different products to put up you're looking at hours of work.
• Marketing and advertising - I know these are two different things, but for a one-WAHM show they can be treated together. In a business driven by word of mouth it means time to get on the forums and talk to people, not just market to them. It means time to find the different places you should be advertising, because surprise, surprise, websites don't find you, you have to go out and find them. Of course you could pay someone to do your marketing for you, but then you need to ask yourself some hard questions about what you are getting out of the business and where you are going with it. (In short, have a business plan, which you should have anyway.)

So my position at the moment is I don't have the time to do all four, and I don't want to take it to the level of outsourcing. So better to take my time and wind it down now, so I can use that time to do things I enjoy more, like playing with the new sewing pattern program I just bought.

I do have another project I'm very excited about, but I'll post about that later. I thought about it and I will be continuing this blog about my new journey.

Irony

Yes, it's been a long time.

I put a lot of effort into advertising the store last year, and with a(nother!) non-sleeping baby it was a hard grind. It didn't cause fights with my husband and he was completely supportive in giving me time, but it was obvious he wasn't happy and felt I was putting too much pressure on myself.

I had a great time over Christmas, I actually got some things sewn for myself and had a ball doing things like making hair clips and scrunchies for my girls. It was so relaxing and fun to sew different things for my family. So I announced that I was going to scale back - not shut everything down, but not push it either and just let it trickle off.

The next day I got an order through one of the things I pushed last year. Then another a few days later. Then someone else when we got back home. It's not a flood, but looking at that and the stats on my website I can see that things are starting to pay off.

The store is starting to look a bit bare so I was dithering about what to sew for it, and with the GDUNH coming up I'm wary of overloading myself again. So now I've been thinking again about where I go from here, and I've come up with a bit of a plan for now.

I suppose the moral of the story is it's a marathon not a sprint. So be patient and make sure you will be able to keep going.

Real life store.

Well it took a while, but out of the blue I got a message from the IRL store saying that they'd sold my nappies and did I want to send some more :) They requested more gender neutral ones, which I found a bit hard because that's what I thought I'd given them.

But I think part of it is having things suitable for little babies, because a lot of their customers are still pregnant so they want something sweet. So here are the two tone nappies, mostly neutral but with a bit of something different. I'm really happy with the way they turned out. I think the apricot ones in particular are a bit girly, the yellow ones would have been good but someone already bought them. So we'll see how these go.

Busy, busy, busy

So much work, so little time.

I have just done my first batch conversion of pictures and I am in love with this programme. Probably other programmes do it too, but this was the only one I had on the computer I am currently on. I just had to click a few buttons and all the pictures were resized and compressed! I have been doing it all by hand, this is wonderful.

I have been doing lots of painting and have lots of flats ready, still working out the best way to photograph them.

The results are back from my testers and I have made some new nappies which are being trialled. I also checked out the new PowerDry and it works well. I was worried about how thin it is, but DD has worn it a few times now and even with toddler wee she feels dry.

I have used up all of my velour making some towels and sheets. They were fun to sew because I got to use my fancy new stitches. This is what I am going to use as my prize in the GDUNH. It is a gorgeous bamboo velour baby/child's towel. The painting is yellow and orange and it has stars and hearts on it. They only come up faintly because of the technique but you can see them IRL. The front was really interesting - the fabric underneath has absorbed the colour but the nap hasn't, so it has this really shiny look and changes colour if you look in different directions. My daughter has been using my first trial ones and they are brilliant for drying her.

The other thing I am madly working on is my website! Yaay!!! I really should finish the tutorials, but I got impatient waiting for them to load and just dove in. I like playing around with it this way, I now get the principals of how it works so I can work out each step more easily, if that makes sense. I am about to go and upload pictures to it so I will be learning how to put products in. I thought I had brought all my photos off my home computer which includes finished stock and things for the gallery, but I don't seem to have saved them :(. Oh well, it would have been nice to have that bit set up but I don't think I will run out of things to do anytime soon.