Happy New Year September 20, 2009

Fall is the beginning of my year.  It always has been.  In the first place, I’m Jewish, so I celebrate the new year in the fall rather than in January.  I take stock and make my resolutions in the fall.  Fall is also when school starts, and when people come back after having a long break.  Fall is when I naturally feel compelled to start in new directions and when the economy begins to ramp up again.

This year my main goal is to take those new directions and make them more, um…directed.  I’m trying to set clear, achievable goals for each of my current projects, which I am trying to cull and focus in service of a greater professional goal: an independent and sustainable career as a creative professional.

I’ve decided I need help with this, so I’ve been in contact with Lisa at the Renaissance Business Center here in San Francisco.  Renaissance is a non-profit dedicated to helping people start and/or grow small businesses.  What makes them different from SCORE, SBA and the SBDC is that they are much more focused on providing intensive, long-term assistance.  Two programs I’m currently looking at are their 14-week business planning course (which has been described as a mini-MBA program), and their 1-3 year business incubation program (probably the virtual incarnation).  I’ve got a tour and orientation on Wednesday.  Hopefully they can help me focus and kick my ass a little.

In the meantime, I’ve been applying for some holiday shows, and trying to create new wares for them.  The one I’m currently most excited about is DesignerCon in L.A. (formerly Vinyl Toy Network).  It’s sort of a combo trade fair/cash-and-carry for folks who make the kinds of things you see in designer toy and comic shops–plush and vinyl collectibles, limited-edition prints, and character-driven art of all kinds.  At $125 for a one-day booth, the cost is comparable to your standard craft fair.  I’m planning on showcasing/selling Sweet Meats on one side of the booth, and presenting samples of my plush design work on the other.  DesignerCon is on November 21st, which gives me a concrete deadline by which to have my new web site and business cards done, as well samples of next year’s toy line.

A little bit further down the list is a book proposal.  I’ve heard from fellow crafters that writing an instructional book is extremely difficult and takes about a year of full-time work to complete.  According to Crafty Chica Kathy Cano-Murillo, just writing the proposal takes a week.  Things being what they are in publishing, writing a book is often not very lucrative, assuming that your proposal even gets picked up a by a publisher in the first place, which is unlikely.  On the other hand, authoring a successful book significantly increases your profile as an expert in your field, leading (hopefully) to press, more clients and higher rates.  What doesn’t get picked up you can always publish on your own, so I’m keeping it as an option for now.

As for making a Thing-A-Day, I’m still doing it, though I’ve fallen back on the “work on an existing project for 30 minutes” net a couple of times this week.  Yesterday I made and decorated a cake for my friends’ 26th/30th birthdays, but I didn’t like it enough to photograph it.  Otherwise I’ve mostly been working on re-making my pieces for the Plush You show next month.

It’s going to be a busy fall.  I’ll keep you posted about what I learn along the way.  Happy New Year, everyone!

Biz Miss Math: Estimated Vs. Actual Time June 24, 2009

Time it takes to complete a project = Your most generous estimate that considers every single tiny part x 2.5

Media Diet June 11, 2009

Reading my alma mater’s alumni magazine makes me feel bad about myself.  I makes it seem as though all of my fellow alums are doing brave and amazing things–some of them at extremely young ages–while I sit here spinning my wheels.  Web sites (blogs especially) also make me feel bad about myself.  They present a world that is overflowing with creative people and all of them, including the hobbyists with non-art day jobs are more creative and prolific than me.  No one will ever hire me in such a world.

It’s bad.  I’ve been spending nearly two hours every morning reading about other people’s projects, ideas and successes, bookmarking the ones I want to post on this blog or try some weekend 37 years from now.  I go back to maybe one in five hundred of these pages.  The rest just waste my time, cause feelings of inadequacy, and make me feel both overwhelmed and behind the times when I review them later.  I get so frustrated and tired with my work as a result that after dinner I just want to veg out.  Then it’s another day wasted, another reason to feel bad.

These feelings only got worse when I turned 29 last week.  Only one more year to accomplish all the things you thought you’d have in the bag by 30!  I decided enough is enough, and A. and I have been on a “media diet” as of Monday.  I’ve been wanting to try something like this for months, but what finally got me going was having a plan already laid out (in Timothy Ferris’ book, The Four-Hour Workweek), and having someone to do it with me.

Here’s how it works: for seven days, we avoid all non-fiction media and severely limit our intake of entertainment media.  In other words, no magazines, newspapers, blogs, NPR, Facebook or Twitter and only one hour per day of fiction reading, fictional TV or video games.  There is no limit on music or interpersonal correspondence.  We are allowed to post things to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and to write non-fiction, since the point of this whole exercise is to make us more productive and confident.  We are also allowed to use the web for project-specific research (like collecting the links for posts) but no idle surfing.

We’re about halfway through now and I’ll admit, it’s difficult.  We watched the premiers of Weeds and Nurse Jackie tonight so now I can’t touch the Wii game I’ve been wanting to play until tomorrow.  I can’t click any of the links to funny/interesting stories that my friends e-mail me and I had to put down the copy of Omnivore’s Dilemma I just borrowed after wanting to read it for years.

Next week when this is over, I will definitely try to schedule my media intake a little better.  I will probably allow myself two hours of “leisure media” per day and go back to setting NPR as my default station in the car.  But I will not open my Google reader every day.  I will open it only once or twice a week, to look for specific things I can use in a post that same day.  No more saving things that “just seem cool” for some nebulous future purpose like a digital pack-rat.

Have you ever tried some sort of media diet?  How did you limit your intake and what happened afterwards?  Did it work?

Maker Faire Madness June 4, 2009

It’s been a crazy week.  After getting back from New York late Monday night it was a mad dash to finish two days worth of contract work and everything I needed to do for the Bazaar Bizarre and When Creativity Knocks (both at this past weekend’s Maker Faire).  I only slept 5 hours each night, during which time I had several stress dreams, including having to perform a trapeze act in front of thousands of people with only ten minutes training by a hairy, naked French woman.  I ditched the circus as soon as I realized my face wasn’t on the poster and the audience wasn’t expecting me anyway.

There were a few snags, like having to leave Eleanor on her own to finish the last hour of mock-ups, and not being able to find the catnip, bells and beans I needed for the WCF steak cat toy demo, but everything got done in the end and the results were fair to good.  The Bazaar Bizarre raffle looked fantastic (thank you volunteers and friends/family of Jamie!), the demo went smoothly (though I had to omit the filling step), and the Sweet Meats sold really well.  In fact, all the vendors did really well.  Everyone kept remarking on how the recession didn’t seem to exist inside the Maker Faire.  Maybe the attendees save so much money by growing their own food and building their own vehicles that they have plenty left over to spend on plush meats and robot soap dispensers.

I love that the Maker Faire Bazaar Bizarre helps me pay my June rent, but I get a little sad that I can’t attend it anymore.  I got to go the first year, which was awesome, but it’s so much bigger than it used to be and all of the new stuff is so tempting.  I want so badly to ride the two-person ferris wheel, but my short lunch break doesn’t allow time to wait on the long line.  This year many of the exhibits were open on load-in day (Friday), so I got to see a few things after setting up that night, but I had to work all that day, so my participation there was limited to about half an hour.  Next year I’m going to load-in first thing on Friday so I can spend the rest of the day exploring the exhibits.  Not everything will be up, but I’m sure it will still fill the day.  One highlight of the Faire was getting an Editor’s Choice ribbon from Becky Stern at Craftzine.  I’ve been secretly coveting one of these for years (I’m a HUGE fan of Craft) and it gave me a nice “mission accomplished” feeling at the end of an insane week.

The day after the Maker Faire was my birthday, so I did a little shopping for myself on Sunday.  I got an awesome tool apron from Polly Danger (I made her assistant take off the one he was wearing and hand it over), a sweet little wrist wallet from eleen, and the most awesome snail mail stationery set from Jill K. in L.A.  My friend Lydia moved across the country to Pittsburgh so I am currently writing her real letters on ugly stationery I bought in high school with lots of cross outs.  She types on lovely onion skin paper using an antique typewriter.  I think the snails will help bring me a step up.  When I first saw the stationery in L.A. I was determined to buy a set even though it seemed expensive to spend $5 for one letter’s worth of paper and envelopes.  Then I heard a man at another booth explain to his wife that of course he was going to buy this $6 card, because he couldn’t think of anything better to spend his money on than a way to meaningfully communicate with his friends.  I couldn’t agree more.

The Great Purge January 1, 2009

Happy New Year, everyone!  It’s almost noon here in Cali, and though I’m feeling a little worse for the wear, I’m also excited to begin a new year.  Being Jewish, I get to experience this excitement twice a year–at Rosh Hashanah, which I use as a time to reflect on my personal life and relationships, and on January 1st, as a time to reflect on my business, and other practical matters.

One of my favorite New Year’s traditions is The Great Purge.  Every year my husband and I go through the house, room by room, and take everything out of every drawer, closet and container.  We give/throw away what we no longer need, and clean and reorganize what we do need.

This tradition was born from Christmas.  We always finished up the holidays with bags of unwanted or duplicate gifts, and the gifts we wanted to keep, we didn’t have room for.  It therefore became necessary to purge the old to make way for the new.  Every year it seemed like we would be able to part with fewer and fewer of our carefully curated possessions, but in fact we end up with about the same amount of free shelf space every time.

The Great Purge is extremely therapeutic.  Every box we take to Goodwill feels like a great weight has been lifted.  Uncluttering my work and living space makes my mind feel similarly uncluttered.  I feel less stressed and sleep better at night.  I’m also able to work on larger goals without all the little stuff to get in my way.  With my house, files, and finances all perfectly in order, I feel ready and eager to tackle the year ahead.  After all, nothing inspires like a blank page.

Want to perform your own Great Purge?  The following resources can help you get started:

• If you don’t even know where to begin, try the book, It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, by Peter Walsh.
• “What financial records to keep, and how long to keep them,” from Bankrate.com.
• Green cleaning: Grist suggests Borax for the heavy-duty stuff.  Most everything else can be handled by combining 5 simple and inexpensive ingredients, as suggested by Annie Bond.
• “How to Clean Out Your Closet,” from Mahalo.  A fantastic, well-annotated article.
• Five rules for removing clutter by Come2Order, and five more from Nikki LeRoi.
• “Quick Tips for Processing your E-mail Inbox,” by Merlin Mann of 43Folders.  Part of his “Becoming an E-mail Ninja” re-cap.
• My previous post about Things.

Good luck and happy purging!

My Distribution Deal November 10, 2008

This week I sucked it up and contacted a distributor.  I had been avoiding it for a long time because I didn’t think I could afford it.  After all, most distributors take about 20% of your wholesale price and I was doing fine on my own getting local stores to carry Sweet Meats.  I even had stores from other cities, states and countries contacting me about carrying my products.

But then I hit a wall.  I had a hard time finding stores outside of San Francisco that would be appropriate for Sweet Meats.  Those that I did find rarely responded to my cold calls (or cold e-mails) introducing my products.  Even those stores that contacted me weren’t responding when I followed up with line sheets and order forms.  I was spending many hours each week trying to drum up new wholesale business, which is only getting harder the more the economy tanks.

So I contacted a distributor.  For the past two years I’ve been getting his wholesale newsletters, so I know how hard he pushes for his clients.  He was also a customer of mine a couple of years ago and several of my sisters-in-plush use him, too, so I know he’s honest and reputable.  His 20% commission definitely takes a big bite out of my profits, but I figured I’d end up paying that much in warehouse storage before I sold everything anyway.

Our conversation was incredibly simple.  He already knows my products, and I already know his company, so there was little needed in the way of introductions.  What I didn’t know, however, is that his is not a drop-ship business.  He warehouses all of his clients’ inventory–for free!  This made the deal infinitely sweeter. I currently pay about $150/month for storage (it started higher, but has gone down as my inventory has decreased).  That means that I’m not losing any money at all on his commission for the first $750 in monthly sales.  I don’t know if such a set-up is the norm, but if I had known, I can tell you I would have called this distributor six months ago.

The lesson?  If you’ve just started your own line, there’s no harm in calling a few distributors and comparison-shopping.  There might be savings in the deal that offset an otherwise unafforable commission.  Now that I no longer have to worry about my wholesale accounts I can focus my time and energy on my retail business, which pays twice as much per sale.  Win-win!