Wednesday, October 11th, 2006
Shopped ’til I dropped!
Yesterday, I completed most of my inventory purchasing at the Minneapolis Gift Mart. It was two days of the most exciting shopping I’ve ever done! Day 1, I power-shopped my way through EVERY store at the mart. I didn’t buy anything, but collected catalogs from all the places I was interested in. I had to drop off a pile at my car 4 times because there were so many!
I went home and parked myself on the couch with a pad of paper, a pen, and a cat on my lap. I went through all the catalogs and put together what I think will be a winning combination of merchandise for the store. I’m SO excited to carry these products - they truly are fantastic!
Then, yesterday, I went back to the mart equipped with a list of all the items I needed to purchase. Have you ever spent an entire day making purchase after purchase? It took me nearly 7 hours to make all of my purchases. What a rush that was! I simply sat down with each sales person and told them I wanted “this” and “6 of that.” It actually didn’t end up costing as much as I anticipated. I was able to carry a couple of really neat lines because I had been conservative elsewhere.
Among the products I picked up were:
- A FANTASTIC bath & body line made locally
- A wonderful candle line that’s new and trendy
- An amazing handbag line that will make you say, “cool!”
- Lots of photo frames, and other decor items
- Baby gift items
- New items for the kitchen
- A few stationery items
- Lots of other cute little fill-in items
I know I’m forgetting something…
The rest of the week is back to busy-crazy land. I received another project last night and all the previous ones are still looming overhead. This, of course, is FABULOUS news for the business, I’m just having a hard time staying on top of it all while trying to get the store open. The good thing is, the more I work, the better I feel about things. I’ve had a lot of weekends lately where we weren’t even home so I couldn’t do anything work-related. This weekend I FINALLY get to stay home and I am itching to get caught up on non-client related aspects of the biz. I hope to get a new website up soon, featuring my existing services as well as a teaser ad for the store. I also need to update my portfolio section.
WOW, business is great. I couldn’t have ever imagined what this would be like. Until next time…