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.
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
Hey Buddy! Have you chance to make any new art pieces, work on your comic or your novel? What's the haps, mang???
ReplyDeleteHi Jenn!
ReplyDeleteI haven't been quite as productive so far this year as I hoped, but things are in the works. I'm working on two series of large, poster-size prints that will be moving away from the movies theme, and I've been having a little trouble with the new format. That little bit of discouragement has probably lead to me working on it less than I should, but the first set will be done and ready to show of soon enough (or else!!).
The comic is still on the backburner until the novel is finished. I'm actually about 2-3 chapters from the end of my book. I'm at the big climax now, which I think I've found kind of daunting.. so work's slowed down a little there too.
All in all, we're going to Vegas for Valentine's day and then I intend to really start pushing past these couple of tiny little roadblocks so I can get the productivity train going again.
Good to hear from you.. thanks for thinking of me, and please keep bugging me if I'm not posting anything. A little peer pressure is always good for procrastinators like me. :)