Several year ago, Ms. SpoolTeacher was trying to be what she had been as an employee, only this time, on her own…being a designer, helping clients with their interior spaces.
Accessory to Design – Interiors “…help to create and bring into being”.
That didn’t work very well, as where she had moved to didn’t have the economy to support her idea, (she had moved to the boonies), and where there was an economy that would was 50 miles away.
Due Diligence isn’t her strong suit.
So she thought about teaching sewing. Ha! Although she did get a couple of students in her little “Shop Around The Corner” (of Main on Huachuca/wah-chew-ka), Lollipops & Polka Dots.
The dog food/treats did very well, but weren’t very profitable. People love their animals. She carried Petcurian, and other well researched options that fit her mission statement of all things that are round and/or well rounded… up-cycled, recycled, useful, necessary, uplifting, whole.
It was a variety store. She had it so full of “things that might sell” it made people dizzy.
That wasn’t good. She was doing her due diligence through the school of hard knocks.
Actually people loved her shop but Wally World came in and offered tooooooo big a temptation/the economy of scale. She couldn’t compete. Everything she tried to bring in cost almost as much as it retailed for there. She even had one supplier tell her to “buy it there and mark it up”, (like she was gonna give her enemy their ammunition).
She tried to bring in things her customers would have to drive the 50 miles into a “real city” to get. Things that they didn’t have. Her customers assured her, “We love to go into the city. We can get away for a day.”
Knock, knock. School of hard knocks.
On the flip side of that, people who drove the 50 miles in to her town, for a “get away day” from the big city, opened their wallets without hesitation for whatever they wanted and exclaimed, “Who would have thought there would be a wonderful shop like this way out here in this little Podunk town!”
They might not have said Podunk.
There just weren’t enough of them and after all, her shop was around the corner of the main street and her landlord wouldn’t take her advice to paint the strip all different colors to make heads turn…
He did paint it after she left and gave everybody new signs, but it was still beige.
Everything is a learning curve. The graphic above took her a gazillion years to produce in Microsoft Paint and it is as crude as it can be, but it was enough to get the idea across, (she never could figure out how to do puppy feet). Her landlord actually was all for it and had a painter lined up, but gave her the command to “see what everybody thinks and get their approval”! Yipes.
She thinks he really had cold feet.
Sure enough, one girl said, “Do I have to be green, it makes me think of hospitals. Couldn’t I be the pink one?”
She had no idea how hard Ms. SpoolTeacher had worked to get the balance she wanted with the colors and what difference if it brought in customers?
Some people have no imagination.
She should have been even more successful with the pet products because she had taken very expensive samples to the pet groomer to hand out for referrals. Didn’t happen. And people who took their pets to groom were always surprised to accidentally stumble in, “I didn’t know you were here!”
Some people.
Right after she left that location, one of the shops on the main street painted their building a baby poop-green and the whole town had an opinion about the color. Made them look though, didn’t it?
Now it’s becoming a Marijuana dispensary and guess what, they painted it beige. Do you think they don’t want to stand out? Think?
Diligence. All in due time.
She trudges on.
Today she found out that you can convert PowerPoint Presentations into videos. Who knew. Learning curves.
So she opened a “free account” and uploaded one she made the several years ago that she thought she might teach sewing as an art form. Ha!
It’s really more about designing.
Well, now all she has to do is re-time it, figure out why some of the pictures didn’t load all the way, why things migrated, figure out how to get it to show up here as a video….
Learning curves. Yipes!
You can see it if you go here (she thinks/hopes). Get some coffee first. It’s a snoozer. Maybe start at the end. There are some cute animal pictures. The end is near. Oh, that was Sunday School talk. Oops.
The end is farther away than you think so if you want to see the whole thing, watch the bar at the bottom.
Pretty cool you can do that, huh? Convert ppt to video.
Anyone know how to spell huh, like when you shrug your shoulders? ↑
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