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.
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