Celebrity Gifting

Celebrity gifting is when a company send their item to a celebrity in hopes that it gets worn by them and noticed by others. It's great publicity, especially if you can get a picture of the celeb with your item.

There are companies who do this for a living and even have co-ops for businesses to split the expense. So, not only do I GIVE the celebrity one of my items for FREE, I pay to have my item sent to them in a gift basket (usually hundreds of dollars).

Is it just me, or does that sounds insane?

Merry Chrismukkah!

My husband's family is Jewish and mine is Catholic so we celebrate both holidays now. Even before the kids were thought of and before we were married, living on Long Island, I would put up a small tree in our rental and we would decorate it with blue and silver bulbs and call it our "Hanukkah tree." This has actually become a tradition now each year.

I started a new one this year.... trying to prepare Hanukkah foods. Dylan is a picky eater so I thought this was a good opportunity to try some new foods. I made potato Latkes, homemade applesauce and pastry puffs. Dylan tried the Latkes... which he ate at first but then decided he didn't like them very much. He then gave them to baby brother and ate the rest of his applesauce. Evan had no complaints! We then had our pastry puff and there is no question that everyone liked those... fried with sugar :D

I wish I would have remembered this sooner, but a couple years ago, I found this site: www.chrismukkah.com
It has everything one needs for Chrismukkah!

Bubele Chocolate Sale!

I am having a sale on all Bubele Chocolates! I am trying to make some room for more inventory, so I now have all this season's colors/patterns 30% off!

I think this has been by far my most popular colors so far and I definitely will have them back next year.

Stress

I think I have hit my limit of stress!

I knew I was stressed out about a lot of things, but mostly about my one business(Not Bubele). I also produce clothing for other designers. I use the same factories for orders which leaves me up half the night most of the time negotiating prices, terms, details, etc. Then, I have to wake up with the kids and handle the customers, who are mostly from the U.S. I am running in and out of my home office all day answering emails, going over details, etc.

Luckliy Adam is now working from home to take on some clients and lessen my load, but the transition has been tough. I am still overworked and it's showing. I am grinding my teeth at night so bad it stripping away my enamel!! What happend to the promise I made 18 months ago that I would live a simple life?

To top it off, because of what happend 18 months ago, I have hormone issues that came from all the blood loss. So, mommy is very cranky for about 2 weeks.... it's great being a woman!! :D

Handmade bibs

I have decided to continue to sew the bibs myself for now instead of doing a mass production of these. I have had some interest in them and I know I could sell them if I did a mass production but I have recently had a TON of poly knit fabric delivered to me. I use this fabric for the neck rolls on the bib.

I have decided that it may be a good time to experiment with different fabrics on the front and back of the bib to see what sells better. I am going to pair up colorful prints with the plush neck rolls and see where it takes me! I am also going to sew matching burp cloths- just a simple burp cloth but with bamboo fleece on one side.

It's official!

I finally received my "official" certificate of trademark for bubele!

It's funny because once you apply for a trademark, the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) sends out little post cards that say you have registered, then again when it's been updated in their system and I think I received a few of these so I just assumed everything was all said and done. It's been a year since I applied and low and behold! I get this is the mail- much prettier than a post card! ;)

Getting Organized: Home and Office

Even though I do work out of my home office,and it is technically the same thing, they do have to be organized differently. For home, I have to organize to make it more efficient for us as parents and kid friendly. I am trying to find a way to minimize the "junk" in our lives. It seems that we have more than what we need and stuff just sits around. It doesn't help that our house is not finished so it is difficult to put things away in "it's place" if it doesn't exist yet :)

So, I have been organizing the office to make it more efficient. Especially for Bubele. I recently reorganized the website and came across the problem of items not being in stock because of poor inventory management. (Who do I fire for that?) So, I decided that all items need be be organized in small bins by color and size. This is a nightmare with small baby items but it is almost done!!

Sales Reps

Bubele has it's very first sales rep, finally! I found a list of sales reps specifically for children's wear on www.jamesgirone.com/ and I would sit down and go through the regional lists and make calls. This lead to no where and took up a ton of time during the day. So, I started going through the lists and just pulling out the ones with email address listed and emailed everyone on the list about Bubele.

I have only done a few lists, but I now have a rep in the Mid West who is incredible! She emailed me back and showed interest in the line. She is so professional and she took the time to actually go to the site and look through my items. Speaking to her was such a breath of fresh air and gave me that extra push needed to reorganize my line and get focused on the more important items like the bodysuit with the attached loop and the bib with attached neck roll. I somehow have to find a way to market these items more effectively.

Taking on an investor?

When I started Bubele, I intended on doing everything myself in order to save money. I am finding this incredibly difficult as I watch other companies grow who have a bigger budget. I am starting to wonder if I should look for an investor for Bubele who can manage the marketing/sales so I can concentrate on designing and producing.

Taking on an investor would probably restrict me in ways, and would probably increase my prices because I use high quality materials, even higher quality than major brands, but I keep my prices competitive.

On the other hand, an investor could manage things that I am having a hard time with.

This decision will take some more thought!

Reorganizing the online baby boutique

When I started selling Bubele online, I had only put in each item individually and gave color/pattern options so customers could mix and match sets as they wanted. I had some great sales doing this....at first. The things that were selling most were the Bubele mix and match separates. It seems like one particular style sold more than the others. It was the same style that Evan is wearing in the main pictures.

As I began to sell out of sizes, I realized I had to reorganize the sets and pair them up so customers could actually see the sets paired up rather than trying to visualize how they would look. I now have Mix and Match Sets and then I listed some individual bodysuits because these are too cute paired with any pants!

I decided to do the same for all the products and now that I have almost everything finished, I will start to focus on sales again.

Advertising

I have had to make some decisions recently about how to advertise for Bubele. If you have read from the beginning (http://www.my-trip-africa.com/) you would see I have had some problems with deciding on how to do this!!

Bubele is still very small and has a very small budget so I am not able to place ads in magazines or buy expensive ad spots on websites. But I have found some very interesting ways to advertise thanks to some other great moms out there who have their own blogs and businesses!

After being featured on Tip Junkie, I explored other blogs and advertising on small sites but with a growing audience. Here is one that I found and have been recently added to their list:

A little description:

MomDot is a mom blog listing site that is run by mommy bloggers, trisha, alicia, and bridgette.They run contests weekly, reviews on awesome (and not so awesome) products for family and kids, and talk about their lives. But more importantly, they feature bloggers and mom boutiques to give them an avenue to get their name out there, also assisting in google links! You can head out and list your blog for free and talk to them about doing an interview about you. Head on over and see what MomDot is about!

I also came into contact with Emily over at Busy Mom who has a great blog with tips and reviews of products. She offers one month of free of advertising if you sponsor a giveaway. I currently have a giveaway on her site: http://busymomcontests.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-10-22T19%3A46%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=4

I also have an ad with a couple more blogs which I did end up paying $25/month for at the beginning which gave me great results at first, but the sales are slowing from those :(

Moving the Bubele Blog

After creating a blog about my journey into starting Bubele, I decided to create a dedicated blog for my clothing line. While I still want to blog about my family life along with my business (I feel the two go hand in hand for me) I wanted to become a little more organized! This is my attempt at becoming more organized and hopefully blogging more often ;)

I am still leaving my old blog up because it explains the meaning behind Bubele and how it got started: www.my-trip-to-africa.com