Ringing in the New Year

Hey! Remember me? The guy who used to blog here from time to time? Long time no see, right? Well, I've got excuses, and some of them are halfway passable.

My big business-related news is that the holiday shopping season was a huge success at the Skahfee Studios Etsy store. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I shipped something like 120-130 orders! I can't believe the reception I've had from the Etsy community, and I am so happy and grateful!

I also learned that my hypothesis when I got into this business, about how all the work in creating the art would happen up front and then shipping actual orders would be a piece of cake... yeah, that proved to be not entirely accurate. December was a blur of boxes, packing tape, styrofoam peanuts, and hours long excursions to my printer, multiple locations to purchase frames and shipping supplies, and the post office. Not to mention that boxing up just a couple orders at a time took a LOT more time than I thought it would!!

A few days before Christmas, the holiday rush finally broke, and I spent the next two weeks enjoying my favorite time of the year. There was family, food, music, food, beer, presents, food, video games, and uh... a fair amount of food. In Southern California, we miss out on white Christmases, but we do gain the ability to comfortably grill outside way into winter. Woohoo!

So TLDR: December was awesome because I sold a ton and a half of my prints and I had an amazing holiday season.

The bad news is that, while I can't deny that December was extremely productive, I didn't get to produce all the other things I was hoping to. Namely: some Christmas-themed prints, and my novel.

Christmas will have to wait, but the novel is a huge priority for 2011. Kelly and I sat down and, in place of resolutions, made a project plan for some 2011 business goals. Amongst mine:

• Launch my own web-based store, separate from Etsy or any other service. (I have an intentinally bare-bones site right now at www.skahfee.com)
• Look into several sites such as deviantart.com where the site takes the orders, prints and ships the art, and I take a commission.
• Redesign and relaunch fatdudedesign.com, start actively looking for web design work
• Finish a good amount of pre-launch work (including many, many finished pages) for my webcomic.

Besides that, 2011 will include a move up the Pacific coast to the Portland area, a family reunion (in-laws) in Iowa, hopefully a trip back to Chicagoland, and hopefully something super awesome for our 5th (!!!!!) wedding anniversary.

Oh and we hit our first milestone for the year already, by starting the year credit card debt free!!!

I hope everyone else's 2011 is shaping up to be as fruitful (and hopefully just slightly less eventful) than ours!

-S