I've been thinking about the last place I was with all of this sewing thing. How I announced it, how I decided to tell everyone I was sewing things again, how that all came about. I remember starting to sew, learning how to use a sewing machine, one we just found in the vast expanses of my parents house. I remember attempting to make my first petticoat out of garbage we found in the house, and sewing through my finger. I began to work downstairs, and I figured out how to make bloomers. The first pair I ever made were striped, and Tori wore them for a photo that listed them on egl. I was one of the first to offer them so cheaply, the economy was better then, and people ate them up. I still have the LJ names, the addresses and the exact orders of everyone who bought something from me. It was all on index cards, so I could keep track of it from taking money to shipping it out. Postage usually only cost me a couple dollars, and at $12 a pair, I could legitimately make a profit.
When applying for schools, I made this collage of the things I had sewn:
I wasn't legitimately paying myself 'a living wage.' I have a concept of that now, what that really means, and as such I've begun to do cost analysis worksheets for Ick. It's part of my business plan, a really large part for me at least, to guarantee for myself that this is cost effective. To a certain extent, so far, it is. But the cost analysis relies on one key point: that we are actually making sales. If we are not, as we currently are not, then there is really no point in cost analyzing labor at all. If we are not making money, then we can not anticipate how much money it costs us to make each item, thus rendering this whole thing useless.
The point, to me at least, of making a business plan is for the individual creating the company to have an understanding of what all this requires. From the grand perspective of things, usually business plans are shown to potential loan givers to ensure that you have the experience etc in order to complete the business as you have decided to establish. I'm absolutely not affected by that right now, which is really sad, because there is no one to lend me any money. I have awful credit, because as my only current mentor put it, my debt to income ratio is bad. I have student loans that I literally cannot pay back because I'm in school and they won't even let me start to pay them back, let alone pay them out completely. Which seems not to be the right way to do it anyways? I don't quite understand all of this, so library books are teaching me lessons. I wish I didn't have class tomorrow or I would spend the whole day in the library with my computer to accurately write a legitimate business plan.
In a business plan you should try to compensate for your weaknesses. I'm a poor writer of this plan because I can't forsee in non-sarcastic clarity actual ways that I can prove my experience or anything of the like... Well, for now, it will be sarcastic.
Right now I'm having a huge issue of clarity. I thought my focus was very very specific, and I thought my competition to be specific as well. I thought, xyz american company will be my obvious competition. But there is no competition, none that's so obvious to say "yes, that company located at "www.this.com" is my competition for this business." This is a new and difficult situation, one that is not dependent on skill or quality like it used to be. It seems to be dependent on getting the most willing of consumers very quickly to a seemingly large stock of product. This seems to mean to me so far to get a website started, or at least a redirect to my etsy for now, and a larger stock of product.
I'm looking into contacting aeo lidia to do my web design. One of my old co-workers works now as a sales person at e page city, but I'm not really into their design. The first company looks like a better one, but it's still really really costly. And I still need to send the state their check for the starting of my LLC. I'm going to look for other options, but the amount of things that need to be looked into to make all of this complete is really complicated.
I don't have any answers but I have alot of questions. I don't have anyone really to talk to about this except Nick, and I am more grateful to have him(and his family) than I have ever been. You never realize how wonderful it is to have a best friend, one that you can tell everything to, until you are with that person pretty much 24/7. I know I give him alot of flack for how ridiculous he is sometimes, but at times like these when I'm working on something really hard and I really need to talk to someone about whatever, I'm so so so grateful to have him here. So many people are so self-centered (like myself, it seems) that I have trouble getting anything close to a conversation out of them, but Nick and I get along so perfectly sometimes I just can't believe we found each other.
That's all for now! Continued tomorrow, with something else that's been on my mind.
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