Now stocked in 3 shops!

Hello! A wee bit of excitingness for you, Princess Crafts teacup candles are now available for purchase from three retail outlets (shops, to you and me)!!

*happy dance*

Clare at The Traditional Vintage Flower Company has been stocking my teacupcandles for a while now and they receive many lovely comments (*blush*) and some have even gone to new homes!

More recently, I have started renting a space in the cabinets at the fabulous Make Do and Mend shop which is the most splendid of shops in Chelmsford. The lovely Hannah has set up a beautiful shop showcasing local artists and crafters in addition to the great workshops on offer. You can learn to knit, crochet, sew, make felt and even how to upholster a footstool! Go take a look at her website and book yourself a course, you won't regret it! Here's a few pics of the goodies I've got in her shop at the moment:

Sporting the new smaller tags

And, last but not least, I made my first 'wholesale' sale last week and some of my teacup candles will soon be ready for purchase at the Juniper Florist in Sudbury!


Small steps but big progress, so I'm feeling quite impressed with myself this week!

WIP: Becoming a bona fide business lady - update 1

In my last post re this WIP, I talked about the first steps I took to becoming a proper business. Well, the business course is over with now and for the most part I found it very interesting and helpful. Although, I haven't done anything with my profit and loss or cash flow sheets since then... numbers are just not my forte!

Today I want to update you on the most recent developments:

• Princess Crafts products are now stocked in two shops - The Traditional Vintage Flower Company and Make Do and Mend. This makes me feel like a proper business!! And there's a long list of shops still to be contacted for opportunities!
• I have two blog sponsorships here and here plus another one in the pipeline for the beginning of August.
• I'm organising my very own craft market in August. This scares me but it's so exciting!
• I have a number of events booked between now and Christmas plus a few more in the pipeline.
• And I'm working on some new ideas for product lines and there is plenty more to come in the next few months!

Phew, that's just the highlights from the last few weeks but it does seem like things are coming together now and hopefully the run up to Christmas (sorry to say the C word!) will be busy and exciting!

WIP: Becoming a bona fide business lady

To date, my biggest (and possibly most scary) WIP is turning Princess Crafts into a proper fully functioning business that earns me some pennies and gives me the job satisfaction I deserve (and have yet to find in a 'proper' job).

For the last six months or so, I've been fannying thinking about with tons of ideas in my head about what I can do, could do, should do, want to do. I'm good with ideas but putting them into practice is sometimes a bit more tricky. It was time to give myself a kick up the bum. So, on 1st May I registered as self employed and now I have to do everything proper and not just diddle about here and there and actually make a huge concentrated effort to make it work. Eek!

I went to the local business development agency in Braintree and was mega surprised to see how helpful these peeps are to folk like me! There's so much support for new businesses out there, I never knew about. I had a chat with an advisor who helped me realise it was time to get my act together and do something about it. Double kick up the bum.

And now I'm doing a business start up course which is FREE! Five whole days of free expert advsie from loads of fab people who have been there, done that and made a business work!! Wowee!!

Yesterday was the first day and I learnt loads. Still got 4 days to go but it's exciting and by the end of it I should have a proper grown up business plan and some firmly set aims and objectives (and hopefully a clue how to go about trying to achieve them!).

Big fat book of things to learn about

Time to get thinking

Figuring out how many pennies I need to live on

Start putting a business plan together

My big fat notebook for important info to remember - a nice freebie from a Spa visit

So as far as a WIP this is my biggest undertaking so far and it will always be a WIP but that's ok because that's how a business should be. I want to be a proper business lady and I'm following my very own Yellow Brick Road to get there.