July 2012 Heading to the NDSC Conference

I’ve been so busy this month; I haven’t had time to work on my Blog.  With summer here and being so very hot, the 1000 impatience that I planted have certainly needed some extra TLC.  The extreme heat this year has been so unusual and besides stressing the trees and flowers, sales are showing the strain of this heat as well.  I haven’t had one sale in weeks.  But, in truth, I haven’t had much in sales at all.  Because I haven't had much to offer so far, I really can't expect people to be kicking down my doors to get to me.  But things are going to improve and in the next few months, we're going to start getting in more products.

I have done no marketing whatsoever … I’m waiting until I have more styles.  Not much point in disappointing people when they call looking for a boys pair of jeans and having to tell them I don’t have any…YET! But I’m so encouraged now with our new factory, that our future is looking so much brighter. 

Here’s the status as of mid-July:

Ladies and children’s jeans are in stock and the ladies full-figured, long-sleeved T-shirts are now available in two sleeve lengths.  Not that anyone needs them now, but fall in truly just around the corner and before you know it, the leaves will be falling.

The large size teen girl style jeans will be on a boat July 20^th and arrive at our shop around August 22^nd.  The factory did us a huge favor and made one of each size for us to take to the conference next week so we’ll be able to take preorders for those.  We have decided to only concentrate on the larger sizes for now.  What we have seen in the smaller girls and boys is that shopping is a little easier for them and being self-funded for this entire business, I’m just focusing now on the hardest to fit sizes.  We’ll get to those smaller sizes later on.

The large men styles jeans will be following shortly behind the large teen girl styles.  We’ll let you know as soon as they are available.  The large teen boy samples are almost complete and when they are, they will send them on so we can test them on our model.  If the fit is good, we’ll start production on those soon too.

We’re headed to the NDSC Conference this week with a whole new look.  We have really pumped up our display area and now have two dressing rooms as well.  We hope to meet lots of new people and visit with some we have met in the past.  Since we have no model for our last size, the youth sizes, Jill has made some muslin samples for both boys and girls.  We hope to have some volunteers stop by our booth and test the sizing.  We’re hoping that it will be a good fit and we won’t need too many changes.  We’ll have to wait and see about this way of testing our sizing.  But with no models here at home, we don’t know what else to do.

I’m keeping this posting short and will make another posting after the conference.