If you’re not familiar with it, SXSW is a HUGE event, held each March in Austin, Texas. There are three parts to the conference – music, film, and the above mentioned “interactive.” I’d really love to be able to head to Austin in March 2010 and provide some awesome Indie Biz Chicks tips in a panel!

The ideas I’ve submitted are:

“Marketing Your Biz Online – Without Going Broke” – you can read more about it and vote for it by clicking here

“How To Give Good Blog” – you can read more about it and vote for it by clicking here

Thank you!!!

When Kelly, (as in Kelly McCausey, Sparkplugging’s new General Editor) asked me if I would like to join the team last week, my answer was an immediate “YES!”  So let’s get started!

I’ll be honest with you  I’m one of those people who gets VERY excited when I am talking about something that interests me and I already have a zillion ideas for blog posts… but I guess the proper way to start this out is with an introduction…so let me tell ya’ a little bit about myself!

I’m a big believer in the DIY Movement and I love business – especially marketing and publicity! I combined those two passions and turned them into my own business in 2007 when I launched  Indie Biz Chicks, a website that provides business, marketing, and publicity info to “women who’d rather work for themselves, than work for the man.”

Some interesting facts:  I was born and raised in America’s High Five (aka Michigan!),  I get very excited over trivia games (trust me, when it comes to trivia, you want me on your team!), I lived in Alaska for quite a few years, I’m the self-proclaimed “world’s best aunt,” I make great cookies, I take way too many pictures and can occupy myself for hours with some paper, glue and scissors (yep! I’m a scrapbooker!), and if I were ever famous, I’d like to host Saturday Night Live.

(But enough about me….. My next post will be all business, I promise!)

I am still very much here. I have just returned from a much needed holiday in Cambodia and Laos. It was wonderful, inspiring and where my man asked me to marry him – yay!

The craft scene is so vibrant and alive in SE Asia. You can see girls and women in shops, cafes and sitting on the streets sewing, weaving and embroidering wherever you go. Also the hand craft of some tribes people (the Hmong tribe) is their livelihood and many tribes people still make and embellish their own clothes, costume, and jewellery. Their work is intricate, colourful and traditional – it was sooooo inspiring to see craft so tightly interwoven into the lives of so many.

There are many cooperatives and groups that work with tribes people and others to support and preserve their hand craft and their precious skills so that factories don’t get a look in. These folks are not only incredibly talented, they are proud of their skills and they are seriously the happiest and friendliest strangers I have ever met on my travels. You get the sense that craft is as integral to their lives now as it has been for centuries – which to me is comforting! I felt that even on holiday, thousands of miles away from my work I was still surrounded by lovely crafters and mucho handmade goodness.

Unfortunately I don’t have any pics of tribal art and craft to show you because my memory card is corrupted grrrrrrrr! If you’d like to see some of the tribal craft you can look here.

So I’m back at work now and really happy to be as well. I still have a monster inbox to get through, but we’re getting there. My assistants have kept the shop ship-shape whist I’ve been away and now we are cooking up something new and (for me) very exciting. After all my extolling the many virtues of Etsy on CraftBoom! I am now going to open up my own Etsy shop – hurrah!

Now I know that many folks often do things the other way round, they open up an Etsy shop and then they look into setting up their own website, and many folks continue to run both – whereas I already have an established website and now I am setting up an Etsy shop. I think I have good reasons for doing this and I will explain these reasons to you in subsequent posts. For the time being you can check out my progress in setting up my U-Handbag Etsy shop here.

Ohhh! I can’t wait to get going! I’ll be sure to keep a diary of the set-up on this blog – maybe we can help each other with tips and advice. It’s great to back!

Here are a couple of helpful CraftBoom! posts on Etsy:

• How to set up an Etsy shop step by step.
• This Weeks Etsy Faves

So to start I am going to tackle Craft Business organization. I am going to do this in parts because there are a few organisational areas of running a business that need looking at in turn (at it will make it all look less scary). Spend a bit of time each day staying organised and it will only benefit your business, help you to remain focused, and far less stressed out!

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Yep! Like; I’m on top of it!

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Different types of business paper work & what to do with all:

• Invoices/receipts for all of the materials that you buy for your business - and this means every single thing you purchase to run your business; from a pearl button to a laptop, from a weaving loom to the phone bill. Be absolutely strict about keeping every one of your receipts. Keep all unpaid invoices in date order in one place to help you plan and prepare your budget to get them paid. When they have been paid store them in date order newest first. A big lever arch file is great for this job because after you have sorted them in date order they won’t move around and become unsorted. As for book keeping I can’t say much about that because I’m a maths dummy so I have a nice friendly account to do all of that for me
• Invoices/receipts for sales you have made in your business - because my business is online sales only I have access to all sales receipts from day 1 to the present day. I usually don’t need them to work with them, but every now and again a customer will call up and say ‘x was missing from my order can you check it out?’ so I can look up their invoice and fix the problem. It’s good to keep hold of sales invoices (at least for 3 months) because besides helping you to tally up your weekly sales figures, they include useful information like the customer address (so you can with permission include the customer in a newsletter campaign), you can also read through your sales to get a feel for what products are popular and not so popular in your shop.
• Supplier catalogues and price lists- sometimes these things are flipping hard to get hold of, other times you get sent a forest of them! Get organised and store the ones you use in a file or a magazine rack, store them in order of materials type, and throw outdated catalogues away.
• Business cards – staple the suppliers card to the relevant cover of the supplier catalogue. As for the other cards try writing a little note the back of each business card stating why the person is important to you and then store in a Rolodex in materials type (or business) type and in alphabetical order.
• Sketches, product development, and craft business ideas - it is on scraps of paper that ideas which will rock the world are born, but only if they DON’T get left in your jeans and put in the wash. What I do is carry around an A5 sized Moleskine with me wherever I go. Should a flash of inspiration occur on the train or at home I can record all of my bag designs, all of my ideas for moving my business forward, blog post ideas, business to do lists all in one place. And no, I have never ever mislaid my Moleskine; it’s not an option. I have gotten through 8 of these books now and I keep them all safe because I look through them every now and again as often the old ideas are just as important as the new ones. Store all sketches, inspiration images such as magazine rips, photos fabric swatches, design notes, and other material samples in a way that makes sense to you. This might be on a big mood board, all a big sketch book, or in a folder. Then you can leave part-developed ideas and return to them later to then develop them to fruition. This is all vital because we all spend so much time designing, day-dreaming, and researching and if we you don’t store all of these plans properly we are wasting a precious lot of time and maybe mislaying ideas which could have had the potential to become business dynamite!

Mmm…back to the the grindstone I guess. Just kidding, it’s great to be back

Righty we have a whole stack of orders to pack, and all of the other stuff that’s built up over a week (scary!). Once all of that is beaten into submission I’ll get on with the “What to do when people say your handcraft is too expensive…” post that I promised you.

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