What I've Been Up To | Lifestyle Post
Oh hey guys. First off, I want to apologize for the inconsistent posts and wanted a chance to explain what the heck is going on!
This post will be very different from my others because today I decided to share with you all what I've been up to. You may have noticed that over the last couple of months there has been a slight decrease in my postings as well as some irregularities. My goal was to post at least twice a week at the minimum but I've been having a hard time sticking to this. As much as I've been trying to post as often as I can, the truth is it has been a real struggle. You may have thought I've become busier at work (which is partly to blame), but there is something else that has been taking up a large chunk of my spare time.
The reason for this is.....drum roll......I've started my own business!
Ok not entirely true, but I am the co-owner of a business I've started with my sister. Ever since I graduated college, it has been a dream of mine to start and manage my own business and sometime in late 2017 my sister and I came up with this crazy idea to start our own bath supply and print business. I promise, I'm not having a midlife crisis - I'm getting extremely burnt out on my Mon thru Friday, 8-5 job. We initially intended to sell strictly on Etsy, but thanks to this blog, I felt comfortable enough to start another Squarespace website and opened up both the website and the shop in late February.
We spent a good part of January perfecting our concept and coming up with the right recipe consistency in our bath bombs, candles & bath salts. And since I have the graphic design skills, I was responsible for creating all the designs for our burlap prints. On top of creating and perfecting our products, we had to design a website, create an Etsy page, build up our social media presence & a build a cohesive brand. It was a lot of work and we spent many late nights sitting at my table brainstorming ideas and taking detailed notes. There was a lot of research put into this as well as many trips out to our local bath/soap supply store to stock up on ingredients in bulk.
It was both exciting and stressful because I'm not much of risk-taker and this has been one of the biggest leaps of faith I've ever taken. I was initially worried about the potential financial risk we put ourselves in and I honestly had no idea if anyone would even be interested in our products.
So after months of preparation, planning and creating we decided to take our products to show to the public. On March 10th, we went to our very first craft show!
We had tons so much stuff, we had to bring 3 cars & 6 pairs of arms to carry all of our products and display sets. We had roughly 2 hours to set up and we didn't have a lot of time to waste so we tried to put together our displays as quickly as possible.
Although we had no idea what to expect and really had no clue what we were doing, I honestly felt like our booth looked the most put together. The negative? It wasn't as busy as we were hoping for. One major reason for this was it was the weekend before St. Patty's day so many neighboring towns including the one we were doing our craft show at, had parades and family activities that same day. It wasn't a complete fail because we did make some sales, just not as many as we were hoping for. It was kind of a bummer because we worked so hard and it was a literal ghost town. Needless to say, we weren't the only ones struggling with business that day so that made us feel a little better.
That was almost a month ago and we're still sitting on quite a bit of products still so we decided to give it one more try. We signed up for another craft fair that will be held outside on a busy street that will be closed down for the day. This seems like it will be a lot bigger (it was also more expensive) so we're hoping to sell out a large chunk of our products. Fingers crossed on good weather because the weather could make or break our day!
So that's just a little background on what I've been doing and why I've kind of been MIA recently. It's been a little difficult balancing my full time job, managing this blog and starting a business but I'm hoping to get back on track within the next couple weeks and plan on sticking to my 2 posts a week goal.
