Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Rough morning!

My email suddenly started acting up this morning. I have my email set up as imap, so that copy of everything stays on my web hosts' server....yeah, it makes downloading emails/pix slower, but it ensures that I always have a back-up of my business emails.

Well all of a sudden, I started getting error messages as I was trying to send emails...and it was an error I'd never seen before. The error came into play when my sent email tried to write a copy of itself to my "sent" email folder. It couldn't write to the proper folder on the server because it suddenly didn't exist!

Someone at 1and1.com deleted a folder somewhere for some reason, and it messed up my email!!

an hour and a half later with tech support, I can now send email again. All of my past "sent" emails are in a "sent items" folder, and all of my newly sent emails are not writing to the usual sent folder. but things are all segregated now and I don't like it! this was not a particularly great start to my day. Oh well, I guess I should be happy that all of my emails weren't lost.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Christmas shut-down

To get ready for Christmas, and to enjoy the holiday (and rest up before the spring rush), my studio will be shutting down starting this Saturday, the 19th. I'll get back to work on Monday, Jan 4th. I will not be making or shipping anything during this time

If you really need some questions answered during this time, feel free to call or email and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!!

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Wicked Weather!

The weather forecast for today is pretty daunting with that major blizzard moving across the Midwest. It's currently 42 degrees outside, with that being the high for the day. as the blizzard moves in, we're going to have some really high winds...which have already started....but we may not get too much precipitation here in Indy. Just high winds and cold air. I'm curious if our power will go out, as that tends to happen in our neighborhood during windy spring weather (even though the neighborhood lines are buried...the lines leading into the neighborhood are not). If the power goes out, I’m not sure how much work I’ll be able to do, and it will get cold pretty quickly, but I've got to say, I wouldn't mind an excuse to have to take the rest of the day off! I'll just make sure I have a fire going in the fire place preemptively!

Saturday, December 5, 2009

New travel dates

Paperwork is getting submitted again for our time over in England.  The paperwork states a start date of June 1-Nov18.  That would put us arriving in England the last week of May and heading home probably on Nov 19th.

So I think I'll be able to conduct a fairly normal spring season ...customers may need to order about 3-4 weeks earlier than they might normally, if they want any customization.  I think that I will be able to continuing offering engravings up until the start of May.  I'll keep this site and the homepage of the crown side updated with any pertinent cut-off dates.

So right now, I'm still working on creating a bunch of stock.  It's a little mind-numbing and also overwhelming all at the same time.  Also, I managed to encounter some Poison Ivy over thanksgiving, (yes, apparently you CAN get p.i. in nov/dec).  So I didn't get a whole lot of work done this week...but did get some good organizing both in the studio and online done.  I'm already working on my to-do list for Monday. 

This evening I have grand plans for trying to get more candle sets posted on the wedding candle page  (all in attempt to have pages as populated as possible for when the shopping cart debuts on Jan 1), as well as updating the wedding pictures page. 

Thursday, December 3, 2009

This made me laugh...

...So still on the topic of England, and our trip being delayed until the end of Spring:  Josh received an apology from the director of his company for yanking us around with the date.  What made me laugh is that the director specifically mentioned that he realizes, also, that now we'll be leaving right during the height of the spring wedding season, and he's really sorry if that causes a problem with my business.  I couldn't stop laughing thinking about all these Aerospace engineers sitting around talking about Wedding Crowns!  So it's official, everyone at Josh's work knows what I do for a living.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Here's the story

Alright, our travel to England (Josh's Secondment) is being put off until June1.  That means we will be leaving town late May.  While they may have been able to work things out for an earlier date if we really pushed for it, there would still be several months of uncertainty.  Josh and I are like-minded in that, we'd rather have a real, actual, solid working date...even though it means waiting a little bit longer than we would ideally like.

So what does this mean for my business?  I'm going to list out a bulleted list, as I plan on directing confused and annoyed customers to this page for the full story
  • from now until the new year, I am going to still really focus on making up crown stock.  I spent a lot of money getting 6 months worth of materials in, and I might as well finish making stock while I am in that mind set.  This way, I am prepared for leaving town, when or if that happens...which ultimately means that I will be able to continue custom work/engravings up until a few weeks before we leave (rather than a few months).
  • I am going to open up the engraving options again (now)...any customer may now add an engraving to their crowns/trays if they'd like
  • I'm going to try and delay any really custom crown designs until after the new year.  I will have more time starting in January to focus on custom work.
  • Starting Jan 1, the website will feature an integrated shopping cart function/check-out page.  But I am also going to start charging a shipping fee at that time.  It will be a low flat-rate. (under $10 for domestic.  Int'l customers are currently charged shipping in the$25-$30 range...I'm going to make that a flat rate for all int'l, too)
  • It will be easy to still add customization to your order, once the new shipping cart feature is added. But I still have a lot of work to do to get all all of your crown and candle options posted, and get things just right....which is why I want to keep things as low-key from now until Jan 1. 
  • As always, call or email me to place your orders for the time being!  And again, Customization is now open again!
  • I will start cutting of customization in May...so place any orders for spring/summer weddings in a timely fashion. I will keep the website fully updated with any cut-off dates.
Thanks to my cusotmers for being so flexible and understanding of our changing travel plans.  I am sorry for any confusion or inconvenience I have caused/am causing.   The bright-side here is that I will be around for filling all the spring orders myself, which makes me pretty happy.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Waiting for clarification...

Alright, well, here's the current UK status:  We should still be heading to the UK next year, but it might get delayed a wee bit.  Why?  The director of Josh's company won't sign-off on Josh's secondment, as the company has a lot of work headed their way at the start of next year.  This is a GREAT thing for the company....but it also means that there's a lot of work to be done...and with a hiring freeze still in place...well, they'd like to keep Josh around for the work.  So, we have no doubt that this will work itself out.  the boys will come to a compromise.

If it turns out that we end up NOT going, well, we'll be pretty disappointed, and I'll have needlessly cut off engravings and custom work...but I'll have a lot of awesome crowns in stock to make my work a lot easier in general. And it will also mean that Josh has a great project at work here in the US to keep him busy...so it is a win-win situation either way.  We are just really looking forward to going to the UK.  So unless we're actually told otherwise, we're still preparing as though we are leaving the 2nd week of Jan.

By early next week, I'll have a pretty impressive amount of stock made...I'll have to post some pictures as the piles of boxes start to grow.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Ready to "Blog"

Alright--I think I have everything set up to have an official Blog now....rather than that news update page on my glass website.  So of course, now that I'm ready to start updating family and friends about our upcoming England trip, it looks like there is a hiccup in the plans.  we'll see what the day brings.