Saturday in the studio…

Sometimes a short day for me in the studio as I am now a student I sometimes spend Saturday mornings at York St John’s or like next week the whole day at Leeds Met.

Today was an important day for getting a particular order out to our Cambridge stockist and I failed! We had two visits yesterday, one expected from our friend Jo from Cumbria and the other an unexpected visit from Brian an ex-colleague of Ruth’s at 5:00 with an invite to the pub, which meant bumping into Vikings and inviting them to the studio (in full costume of course).



But, due to a late night, effects of alcohol, university and an invasion of some 10+ Vikings (with photograph as promised), most of the day was used up so I shall have to spend an hour or two on my day off to get the order delivered on Tuesday (still on schedule!)

After a design review of the Alice in Wonderland cards on Friday, we concluded that a couple of changes were required: we didn’t need the text under the image, the image needed to be square, the border needed to be twice as wide and we agreed the photographic quality needed to be better; this was resolved with more and different lighting. The end result is much improved, don’t you think?



Hurray for the weekend… website updates and more.

Thursday in the studio…

This morning I had to perform one of my least favourite tasks within my role in Sumptuosity – chasing payments; we may hear through the news that the recession is (supposed to be) over, but from where we sit in the small craft business I can confirm that this is not the case; more and more stockists seem to be stretching their payment terms beyond 30 days; thankfully, it’s not often we have to do this and it didn’t take too long then it was back to the more usual ‘stuff’ in the business.

We have an unusual sales opportunity coming up in the middle of March, the Alzheimer’s Society will be selling our products in a craft fair with KPMG Leeds; more ‘hi-res’ images required for the marketing material; my job for tonight; if it goes well, there will be many more sales opportunities with the society.

Six packages to post today, we’re soon going to need a pull-along shopping trolley if we keep posting so many packages together! All the Scottish Trade Fair orders (apart from those wanting delivery in March) are now dispatched.

Sophie has created six Alice in Wonderland images, we’re determined to turn these into cards, here’s my first pass at the card design:


I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the images.

Wednesday in the studio…

We have had a number of new trade stockist orders this month, many of which are follow-ups from the Scottish Trade Fair; one order arrived on Sunday was paid for Tuesday and asked if we could dispatch that day (holidays/Cumbria &c)! We weren’t able to as we had other commitments but it has been dispatched today, how’s that for service? Quick turn-around of orders is one of the key aspects of our keeping the customer satisfied policy.

The Sumptuosity fairies are flying with the embroidery, we’re very much up-to-date with our trade orders at the moment, apart from Ruth with her Kelmscott & (huge) Shakespeare orders; Sophie and Alanna will soon be embroidering to fill the stock boxes rather than for orders. It feels strange since last month was so very busy with trade order emails pinging on the computer two & 3 times a day, the emails are a little slower this month (especially after Valentines day); it all evens out over time, though it’s very easy to start to get a little concerned when you go a day without a stockist trade order (which we have today) until this very second when the email pings with an order from our stockist on the Wirral; now the world’s a good and happy place.

Sophie has an order on the go at the moment with forty Alice in Wonderland mirrors and 50 Alice in Wonderland rectangular brooches, phew! Another stockist emailed today wanting ‘hi-res’ images of our Alice in Wonderland mirrors for a national newspaper article! Anyone would think there was an Alice in Wonderland film due out or something!

Customers have been in & out of the studio on a regular basis today, it’s the Viking Festival here in York it’s quite surreal to be looking out of the window and see a group of Vikings walking by (what is the collective noun for Vikings – comments please) and if we get any of them in the studio shop I promise I’ll take a photograph and publish it on the site!

Today’s postal mail included a notice from HMRC about the 2010 Employer Annual Returns today; every time we receive mail from HMRC we automatically perceive it’s going to be a problem… Even before we open the envelope, we really have to get out of that frame of mind as I keep hearing “Tax doesn’t have to be taxing!”

Any one who has a business telephone number will agree with me on this – we don’t half get a mass of time wasting telephone calls each day: Titan Telecom, Commercial Power (currently the biggest culprits) and RTA (asking if we’d like to sell our business)! Does any helpful soul have any suggestions how we can stop some of these calls? We must get in excess of ten per day; does anyone else suffer this problem!

All-in-all a busy and fruitful day; do read Ruth’s blog about her invite to the opening of the NTU lace archive, we had a great time yesterday evening and I’m so very proud of her and her achievements.

Thoughts on a Trade Fair...

We recently attended the Scotland's Trade Fair at the end of January; I was very excited beforehand as we already had some 30 stockists in the region and was ready to make a big improvement on this. The trade fair was to run from Sunday to Tuesday and from past experience generally Sunday is good for business with larger independents, Monday is good for municipal galleries and Tuesday is usually smaller independents.

At this trade fair, Sunday was good but Monday and Tuesday were poor for orders and my initial response was downbeat; however, the inquiries and subsequent orders since the trade fair has been fantastic. A common thread seems to be that our beautiful vibrant silks will make a welcome bright change to the usual tartan and tweed.

It just goes to show, that you should never count your chickens...

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!