Finances, Business Cards & Packaging - OH MY!

Crafting is ridiculously fun.
You create things that you conceptualize in your own head.
Sometimes it even turns out the way you hoped ;)

Businesses are boring.
There are rules, paperwork, and other official-sounding things.
But businesses make money... crafts sitting in a closet don't!

Sooo that means I had to put my Entrepreneurship hat on today and get down to binnis.
My business cards that I ordered from Vista Print showed up today and they came out GREAT! I know you really want to see them, so I took a picture - just for you...

 They're super spiffy. The top two are actually the SAME card (well, not physically, that's just silly). I love how I can showcase one of my items on my business cards - basically I ripped off the idea of the Moo cards.
The other card is just a generic biz card, but I like that it has polkadots.






The other business-related accomplishment in the past 24 hours was setting up my financial spreadsheet. Basically it just shows me that I'm not making money... YET! I knew this would happen though, so it wasn't a shock or anything. Basically, I had a little box getting pretty full of receipts from buying supplies, and I realized that it was going to be a PITA to wait much longer to enter everything. No time like the present, eh?
It makes me feel so official!

I also finalized my packaging for my products. Nope, no snazzy photo to show you right now. But I'm using tulle so the product can still be seen through the packaging - and it looks pretty enough to just give as a gift that way. I punched a hole in a bunch of the "LOVE" cards and used those as a tag. I gotta say, it looks REALLY professional. The tag really makes it, to be honest. I was able to get all of my existing products wrapped up with the tulle I already had, so it was pretty perfect. Probably should add "get more tulle" to the to-do list for this week...

Got a ton of photos taken for some new products that will be in my Etsy shop soon. I keep switching up my photo methods - and this one is far and away the best so far. It was my first time shooting outside and it was AMAZING. First of all - flash-less photos aren't super blurry because the sun is so bright. Second of all - white actually looks WHITE in natural light. Go figure! Plus it was nice to be able to get outside for a bit. Though I'm sure my neighbors were wondering what in the world I was doing out there! Oh yeah, go check out all the new pictures!

Its been two months since I first opened up shop on Etsy.com and I'm shocked by how much I've learned. I basically went into this endeavor without planning at all - I just jumped in. And it looked that way. Little by little things are becoming more professional and I'm getting proud-er of my work every day. It really hit me today how good some of my items are when I was going through the photos (sorry if that sounds vain, but hey, I gotta love what I'm creating and selling, right?!). Like, I'd TOTALLY buy stuff from me... if I weren't, you know, me.
Finally, I'm starting to not feel like a 2nd grader in a Calculus class among the other Etsy sellers. I feel like I know what I'm doing, even though I know there's still SO much to learn. But I'm finding that the more confident I am on Etsy and with my painting, the more confident I'm feeling about myself in general - is that weird? I feel like it is.

My next venture is into selling special orders by consignment at the toystore I work at (thanks to daddy owning it - he's helping me get started). I meant to create my samples for the store today, but got too caught up in photography and laundry... there's always tomorrow! I'll be sure to keep tabs on how this process goes, even though my situation is unique by selling through my dad, I'm sure there are still a lot of learning opportunities to come.

By the way - I'm thinking this week I would like to feature a fellow Etsy Seller on the blog. I have a few shop owners in mind, but I'm open to suggestions and self-nominations ;)

Thanks for stopping by!
Have a Champ-tastic night!