New Products at Bub’s Trading Post
Main point: There are new products at my booth in Bub’s Trading Post in Sapulpa, Oklahoma.
Longer discussion about my life and all that stuff:
My folks found the other two panels to the grate thing I’ve had stored in my barn for near on a decade now. It was a room divider we used for something when I was a kid – don’t ask me for what, I can’t remember at this point. I’m just surprised they had the other two panels in their attic. Anyways, dad got those two down for me and I was able to set up the full room divider at my booth. My SO had the brilliant idea to screw little cup hooks to the back of clothes pins and crimp them around the wire on the room divider and that’s how I’ve got all the products attached. I thought it was rather brilliant, honestly.
I think from last week, I sold two towels and a beanie. At least those were what were missing from last week’s picture to this week’s picture. I didn’t feel like harassing the lady running the store to check the sale tags. I’ll find out official sales numbers in the beginning of October.
Currently, I have a lot of my beanies and scarves taken off of Etsy – only because they really weren’t getting much of a hit on the ads. I feel like there are a lot of beanie & scarf makers already on that market. But, in store – I think that might work a little better. Maybe. We’ll have to see. Bub’s is a discount and thrift store, not necessarily a craft store – so my products are a little bit of an outlier. There are a pair of people who do sublimation cups and mugs – so, there are some new products. We’ll have to see. It’s a small shop, but I think I’m going to prefer that for a long while yet as I get used to stocking and seeing how demand works out for me. Ideally, I would have booths in multiple consignment shops in my area and that would give me options, but for now, financially at least, I need to focus on this one IRL booth, the Etsy shop, and getting this website up off the ground. My long term dream goal: to open up a shop in Eureka Springs, Arkansas or Santa Fe, New Mexico in the arts district where tourists can walk in and buy all kinds of embroidered goods with sarcastic and funny sayings. Most of my patterns are on a cottage industry license, so I won’t be able to keep using them at that point, but by the time I need an actual store front, I should have the digitized software mastered, right?
Oh, and I took on a receptionist job for a traveling vet for a few hours a week to supplement reinvestment income into getting a better machine for the embroidery business. I would like to move over into sweaters and baseball hats – but that machine is going to be near on $6K and the software I’m wanting is going to be upwards of $1k to do digitization embroidery designs. Let’s just be real here and recognize that I am not going to be able to make enough materials with my little Brother PE500 and Sentro knitting machine to be able to afford either of those things for a couple of years otherwise.
This is also nice because it keeps my resume relevant and puts away a consistent, if small sum, into my social security. I know there are a lot of people saying that it will be dried up by the time I retire. However, seeing family suddenly face financial difficulties because their spouse put into social security, but they didn’t and the spouse has passed on…yeah, that was a reality check hard.
Alright, so that’s a booth set up, an Etsy shop running, a new part time job…oh yeah, I also added in walking 1-2 miles 3-4 times a week and going to the rock climbing gym 2-3 times a week. That one I’m really enjoying, even if I’m not all that great. That will take time, though. Now if only it would cool off for a bit so I can go camping.
Next project is to figure out how to integrate Stripe and Square together so I can take orders on this website. Wish me luck.
