It has been MONTHS since I’ve blogged – so long! The past few months I’ve felt like I’ve had to disconnect from being online a bit, take a bit of a break. I’ve been going pretty much non stop for the past 5 years. I’m not saying this in a complain-y sort of way , quite the opposite, I feel so blessed to be doing something and building something that I love so incredibly much. I’ve also been super lucky to have Brooke on board now to take care of online stuff, do uploads, answer emails, knows how to talk to web developers and just gets stuff done. I feel like I can leave the shop now! If you own a small business you know how incredibly HUGE something like this is. I can’t leave the shop for more than 3 days at a time but small steps, right? I’m still doing all the doll eyes, which takes up about 3 days (and I always have a basket of heads with me to work on during the weekend) and I just can’t let go of doing my books. Anyhow, why am I telling you all this? Boring!
I’m really loving where things are at right now. It feels like the craziness of the uploads is calming down a bit. And, after years of building the business up, the supply is meeting the demand. Instead of the dolls going in like 5 minutes, now it’s taking a few hours for all the dolls to sell out. I remember lamenting to John a few years back about how I just wanted the dolls to stay up for a while, so that it wasn’t so hard to get them. We’ve also dropped the one a month limit now. It feels like things are stabilizing now. We are also introducing new things, like our jointed dolls and soon to be baby dolls. And YES – Little Buddy dollies will be more available as weeks go on. The situation we have here is so unique. One sewing mama falls ill and all of a sudden we don’t have 7 LB’s, then another has a vacation, another has a baby – doll sewing can be SO up and down. I’ve hired on 4 new gals though specifically for LB’s and we should start seeing their dollies just before Christmas time. Yay! More LB’s!
I’m really excited about everything that’s happening here. It feels like Bamboletta has grown up a bit – I’ve worked hard to keep the love and handcrafted beauty in the dolls by having the most wonderful and talented lovelies working with me who really ‘get’ what we do. But now I also have the stuff in place that will keep Bamboletta around for the long haul. Like organizing inventory, semi ‘departments’, and stuff like that. It is different now – this isn’t something that I do in my living room anymore and now we have almost 40 women that depend on bamboletta for work – gotta make this ship TIGHT! Never in a million years did I think I’d be in this position and I really have all of you gals to thank. You really are the best customers EVER! It’s been so nice to see so many ‘old’ names, customers from 5-6 years ago now buying for siblings or for themselves. I’m really humbled by all this.
Ah! It’s been so nice to ‘chat’! I hope everyone is keeping well and having a magical summer! Talk soon!
xo Christina
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