Thursday, September 11, 2008

THIS THAT AND HALLOWEEN



I'm one of those people that refuse to give up. Now before you think wow what a great attribute let me tell you it really could be a curse.
I've sort of reinvented myself or business to just keep it going. If I find something doesn't work right away I go on to the next thing. Such as Ebay, man for the life of me I can't sell a thing on there. Others that I know personally are doing okay making some money and others are doing really well. Me I don't know if it's the product (you can't smell soap on-line) or what. So my thought was back to the drawing board. You do realize that all these ideas are to generate money so I can make a nice living doing what I love to do.
So then I said to myself, myself, how about trying craft shows again. Okay cause the money could be good. On the Sponge Docks for Labor Day weekend there was a craft show so I took $150 of our earned money and applied. I got accepted and was promised a spot near the entrance to the mall where my store is in. They honored that request.
Saturday the first day of the show was brutally hot and ugly humid. My son was complaining about the heat as he trucked our tent, tables, soaps etc. Because of my age the sweat was pouring off of me. It's pretty disgusting to be a sweating senior citizen. By the time I got the booth looking some what decent I was soaked thru and thru down to you know what. Plus on top of that the others (my daughter and son deserted me) well not really I told them to retreat to air conditioning.

So we are set up and the heat is still unbearable standing still. I'd be shaking my head thinking, what was I thinking. Well the relief finally came in the form of a storm. Yup rains came, customers left, even though I only made about $20 during the heat. So we shut down early fearful that our tent would fly away and that would increase our costs to the application fee plus a new tent with a $20 day.

Next day was worse. Oh the weather was better but the rain was threatening again, (weather bureau said more of same for Sunday) and the wind was so bad that one of us had to hold the tent down as we watched people walk by our booth.
Okay I came away from that experience to never do it again, yup I decided to ditch the idea of craft shows. Just way too much work that I don't enjoy.
So are you wondering yet what's my new idea.

Teaching Soapmaking Classes.

I think I'm good at this soapmaking and I've had people ask me if I have classes. Will I be giving away trade secrets, maybe but I think it would be okay. If you read up on marketing and all of that stuff you'll read about how you should show yourself as an expert. This will do that for our company and hopefully they'll come and buy our products when they see the time, love, enthusiasm we put into our products.

I'll be holding soapmaking classes starting in October. I've designed some new Halloween type of soaps (pictured here) and I thought it might be fun for others to learn how to do it. If you are in Tarpon Springs come sigh up!