Input - process - output

You can tell how busy we are at the moment by the reduction in mine and Ruth's blog postings and the neglect of newsletters. We have really ramped up production in the last month or so; several techniques have been tried and discarded and we now have an amazingly simple system that suits the embroiderers down to a tee.

So the embroidery process has been honed to perfection; though I am working at least eleven hours a day in the studio cutting and preparing silks and making up the button brooches and mirrors; I can just about keep up with the demand but this leaves little time for all the other essential tasks such as the cataloging of orders on the database, admin, filing &c; to be honest I haven't even started an orders sheet for October (and we're half way through it already, so I know what I'll be doing this Sunday afternoon). We also have a situation on the output side also, six or 7 orders are waiting to be packed, wrapped and dispatched which is not good.

So, the lessons we have learned here is that we can't improve productivity in just one area of the business without addressing the relative effects on the other parts. Today we need to discuss and develop a way to pack and ship orders more quickly; it's going to be challenging but we have to do it. I know I could transfer some hours from embroidery to packing but I really don't want to do this; the first task will be to examine what we are doing now (packing-wize), a bit of time and motion study, and determine if there is room for improvement; I don't know at the moment, it is one area of the business that I have had relatively little input to... Probably because I know it is going to be a challenge. But now the time has come to face the problem.


Whilst making-up and packing hundreds of brooches each day, it's amazing how your mind works to cope with the repetition; whilst packing this order I suddenly noticed that I was coordinating my packing - shoes an dresses, tea & knitting, handbags and cocktails &c. We know how to have fun!

We never saw that coming

Three (plus) weeks into September and I would never have predicted a month like this. Sept 1 and a remittance arrives from a stockist along with an order, not only for their shop on the South coast which we have supplied for a year now but also for their shop in Cornwall (new for us); total order c£1,000. Jane Austen Centre prepare for the Bath Jane Austen festival and need hundreds of items all very quickly – 250 bookmarks (+ the 75 we do each month), 100 rectangular brooches, 50 mirrors, 20 notebooks. The next day an order arrives from our stockist of the year £1,500 and we’re receiving 3 to four trade orders a day through the website. We knew it would get busy before Christmas but I never pre-empted this. We were well passed an order book of five figures for the month before Top Drawer then, we did Top Drawer and things began to get scary.

We’ve ended up with some 80 orders (so far) this month; how do you manage with a workload like that, and most stockists are expecting a two weeks turn-around. We got the timing just right employng Alanna, thank goodness; we would have been in a mess if we hadn’t. Planning and preparation are crucial, the processes we’ve developed to keep production levels up are quite ingenious and in the main they’re working well. Long gone is the micro management of every-ones daily tasks, we all now have responsibility for maintaining stock levels of certain designs throughout the whole product range (brooches, bookmarks, mirrors &c), Ruth – birdy, veg and sheep; Sophie – crickets, beetles and flowers; Alanna – cocktails, cups, teapots and dresses; of course, with many designs there is a cross-over, Ruth & Sophie with bees, everyone works on hearts and cupcakes.

We split stock of materials, labels, cards, lavender, brooch bits and mirror bits, notebooks, boxes &c into two equal amounts, as soon as a stash is exhausted we move onto the next and immediately reorder, we cannot run out of anything.

Our output has increased dramatically, Barbara and I are picking and packing £700, £800, £1,000 worth of trade orders each day; my aim is to minimize the number of stockist chase-ups for orders; non so far this month but they will start next week.

As well as all of this, we’ve dispatch samples of our mirrors to John Lewis partnership, prepared and shipped hundreds of our ‘alas’ (Yorrick) brooches to the Globe theatre and hundreds of vintage brooches to the National Portrait Gallery.

Negotiations are still ongoing with National Trust; we’re now developing a squirrel design especially for them (Sophie took an hour out yesterday afternoon and created some lovely designs). We’re quite pleased the NT order didn’t arrive in August, I don’t think we could have coped; we’re informed it will happen in October for delivery early next year.

Also, a little birdie tells us we’re on the radar of the RSPB (pardon the pun), for their shops from January, this is only verbal at the moment but… watch this space.

We have only two major Christmas exhibitions this year, we’re turning late requests down now as the supply amounts for these two are so big and we have so much else going on.

The best thing about all of this that we feel more like a grown-up business, we’ve passed the early development stage! We keep putting the stockist first and this makes all the difference; we’re getting rave reviews about our trade ordering system I developed specifically for stockist ordering.

I find you have to liken business like this to spinning plates and doing all you can to keep them all spinning, sometimes, a couple might begin to wobble, but you catch them before they fall; sometimes a plate falls, but as long as you’ve tried you’re hardest then…

The girls (all four of them) have gone to Manchester today hunting vintage and antique textiles at the antique textile fair at the Armitage Centre; still working on a Sunday!!! That’s what I call dedication.

It's all about the stockist

Along the road to where we are now we have realized a number of things:

Firstly, for Sumptuosity it is all about the stockist; we do sell a fair amount through the website and sales are building from the studio shop, but these don't compare to the income from our stockists...

We don't advertise in magazines, tried it for a short while and it didn't make any difference to sales; also we don't do press releases for Craft & Design magazine or Selvedge (or any comparable); generally it is other makers that read these texts, not people who are interested in you and your products...

We don't do craft fairs any more, we did for a year or so but when you're in a hall in whatever town you are so dependent on many things, the weather (not too nice, not too bad), time of year, other things around you; all these things you can't influence...

We concentrate solely on craft trade and trade fairs and our appearance at these fairs; leave the selling of your products to the experts in the craft galleries and gift shops up and down the high streets of Britain, streets which need all the help they can get right now.

Our stockists have become firm friends and many of the good ones have constantly reordered our products through the last three years. These are the people that are keeping (now) five hard-working people busy (and paid full-time) in the studios of Sumptuosity (in York city centre).

Remove the pain and the job gets done

I analyze the process of all tasks especially the tasks that tend to get left to the very last moment they can be done; usually this is because it is a painful task. If you find this is the case analyze the task, determine why it keeps getting left, remove the pain and the tasks get done.

We used to do all our silk cutting in a cellar, it is cold and damp down there, we were always running out of cut silk, so I moved the cutting table upstairs renewed the cutting mats and I replace the cutting blades every month. The roles of silk are bound with an elastic band both ends to keep them tidy and stop them from fraying.

Now we never run out of cut silk, silk preparation is now a pleasurable task.

I’ve also removed the pain from stockists ordering our products; I’ve created a customized web-based order form, password protected obviously.

The form allows the stockist to enter design quantities within each product and the product count and price, as well as the total order price updates automatically (using javascript) (top image). It takes (probably) 2 minutes to place an order online; we get an email with all the details and then let the stockist know when we aim to dispatch their order and confirm all the details (bottom image).

We mail them every time the order status changes: when the order goes WIP, when it is complete, when it is dispatched.

We now get ninety percent of our trade orders through the website.

Stop running in to the same brick wall

Why use such a title? Well, I am determined to learn from mistakes – mistakes are a good thing as long as they do not cripple you and you learn from them I find.

Increasing productivity is an ongoing project and one that there is less and less areas where we can now ‘trim the fat’; never the less, it has been a good week and one where a further change in process has yielded favourable results.

Last week I tried to group all the weeks order tasks (making of button brooches, making of bookmarks, making of lavender bags &c) together, but when it came to packing 10 or so orders on the Monday many things had been missed so Ruth spent practically the whole of Monday filling holes from the previous week – not good.

This week I divided the tasks in to orders comparable to the size of production I wished to achieve each day; but I always leave the lavender bag and notebook sleeve production for all the orders for Friday when Ruth and I have a day off; there is little freehand embroidery required for these tasks so now do not necessitate any input from Ruth. This new process has worked much better, we could see completed orders earlier in the week and these completed order trays were put to one-side; mentally it helped us all as we could physically see where we had come from and where we still had to go.

So seeing we have a problem and changing the process has helped tremendously; we have stopped running in to the same brick wall.

Other things we have changed include:-

• documenting an order on receipt rather than when it is to be dispatched, we now give every order an order number which corresponds to the invoice number, all the paperwork is completed up front;
• informing the stockist (by email) at each change of status of their order – when it is WIP, when it is dispatched &c. This means that the stockist spends less time chasing us.

Another proposal I am considering is to pre-empt orders from stockists who order the same (or very similar stock) very regularly. We can build stock of our button brooches and store them in boxes but it is quite difficult to do this with bookmarks, handbag mirrors &c. So pre-empting is going to be my next tool to improve productivity for our very regular stockists so when they order and state delivery asap, they will get it within a day or two.

This weeks productivity matched last week but I think that tomorrow (Monday) we will see the result of the benefit of the new processes when it comes to packing.

We gained two new stockists this week, the first being the Bessemer Gallery in Sheffield; they contacted me when I was still in Sweden (some months ago) asking for trade info, I replied immediately providing the login and password to the trade section of our website but heard nothing for a month (I always flag trade enquiry emails for a one month follow-up, in case the enquiry goes cold), I followed up and again heard nothing, so this week I thought I would give it one more go before I let it go completely; this time round I received an immediate reply and an order followed later that day. Polite persistence does sometime pay off, it seems.

The second new stockist is the Quilt Museum here in York; I contacted them last week asking if we could swap leaflets so they held leaflets for Sumptuosity and Sumptuosity held leaflets for them. The museum director agreed and suggested I contacted the commercial director, which I did; we met on Wednesday morning and Wednesday lunch we received a surprise order! Apparently, a record time in which a prospective Quilt Museum supplier being reviewed and approved! We are pleased. We have created some “I love quilting” & “I love patchwork” button brooches and handbag mirrors specifically for the museum.

I had to design a quarter page add for the Top Drawer exhibition catalogue this week, I spent a couple of hours on this and was extremely pleased with the result. First of all I collated all the information and looked at examples in a comparable catalogue; I was surprised at how BAD many of the advertisements I looked at are, filling every bit of space with text and image.

We have decided our brand image and we always stick with it, and I love negative space, it is so decadent. So now we have our colourway and I have decided our typeface to be ‘courier’ the basic form is so appealing.

This layout will follow-on to a brochure/catalogue too.

We have a post student placement starting this week – Alanna, I think she is with us for a couple of weeks. We have had student placements with us before (before I came into the business full-time) and it always hindered productivity; so, I am determined this will not happen this time around, Alanna will get a rounded overview of the business and will contribute in all areas. The one change this time around is that I will plan her duration with us as much as I plan the weekly production.

More insight to crafting a craft business next week