27 May Business strategy, my husband and new pens
Hi you!
How are you? Fine, I hope. Here in Sweden the kids are counting the days until school ends – 12 more days, in case you wondered, until summer break. That 10 weeks summer vacation that they have earned so well, and that I myself both long for and dread, to be honest. It’s amazing to let them into the freedom of sleeping in and do whatever they want, but also goodbye alone time, and hello kids nagging and fighting. All of you guys who have home schooled your kiddos for months, I bow to thee. Really, I do.
Most of my days are about packing orders, making lettering pads, drawing practice sheets, walking the pup and checking the cats for tics, and that’s pretty alright with me. I still have a list of new stuff that I want to bring into the shop, one of them which I released today, but more of that in a minute. I also have all these ideas of new products that I want to produce myself – weekly and monthly planner pads, different affirmation cards set, tape, new kits, new posters, new cards and so on. At the same time, I’m working with my husband to make online classes and developing some sort of a strategy for my digital products presence. Not to mention the fun clients I want to hunt down and force to hire me… The trick as a business owner is to work both long and short term, I think. Not just one, but both. Either you work them both every day, and decide how many hours you want to spend on each, or you work them different days or weeks. As long as you’re not only working short term to get the money in today, but also make sure you pave the road for bigger results in the future, you’re good. It’s so easy getting caught up in the short term, especially in times like this.
Today my darling husband has joined, he’ll be the head of video making and I love him for that, first on that list is a small practice sheet’s video, as you probably can see above. Rule no 2 of today’s rock your business like a pro-list: Thou shalt not do it all thyself. Really, there’s no way that you could manage that without loosing a: your mind, b: serious sleep, or by c: fill your days with 95% frustration and 5% fun, instead of the other way around.
Now, if you can’t force the people you sleep with to cut in, then you must surely have friends around who can? I’m telling you, if I had be the only one to figure everything out regarding logistics to most parts of the world, customs declarations, packaging, currency switchers, which printer to choose, paper purchase, client’s emails, auction plugins and so on forever and ever, there would be no Ink & Lise, because I’d crash half way through, if I’d even make it that far. My husbands does all the printing, builds the webpage and fixes the plugins, handles the numbers and supports in a million other ways.
I want to do most of the day to day things on my own, besides the printing, because I don’t have the printers in my office. I update the web page, handle the clients, suppliers and invoices, admin, sales and of course the client work. That’s important to me, I want to be able to handle it on my own. But as soon as there’s big decisions to be made, new ideas to try off, weird logistic things or taxes, we’re a team. And by that I mean that he fixes it, hehe. No wonder I sleep with the guy. And you can tell by the pic I just took that he’s as enthusiastic about this arrangement as I am:
Anyway, that was not what I wanted to talk about – I wanted you, my dear blog reader, to know first of all, like always, that I’m dropping new pens in the shop today! (And by drop I don’t mean dismiss, but more like release, get it? Seriously, writing in a language you haven’t been practicing since college a hundred years ago has, shall we say, its challenges.) Just look:
The German pen producer Stabilo, which here in Sweden at least, is mostly known for their fineliners and highlighters have made a brush pen version of their famous pen 68, and I really really like it!
The tip’s a bit bigger than fine tips like the Pentel Sign Brush Pen, but smaller than the Sakura Koi and definitely smaller than Ecoline Brush Pens. That makes it perfect for beginners who want to draw a bit bigger words – cards, quotes or tags, for instance – but who doesn’t want the really big and soft tips that often are a bit harder to control. The come in sets of 10 and 20 colors, which are waterbased and bright af.
And as you can see, you can create quite the line width dynamic with this tip. Love them! Oh, and you can find them here.
Per usual, you get to know before I tell the rest of the world through instagram. I normally keep the first batch quite small to see if it flies or not, that way, if you don’t want to miss that first batch, it’s a good thing to keep an eye out in here. I’ll post them on instagram this Friday.
Okay, I need to go hug my husband now. See you!
