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I have a beautiful granddaughter who was born with Down syndrome. She has enough challenges to face in her life and I want to make sure that finding appropriately fitting clothes will not be one of them.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

The New Year Is Off With A Bang!

How did the time get away from me since my last post?  I can’t believe I've missed December and January especially since there have been so many wonderful things happening.   I’ll have to try to squeeze it all in somehow without writing a novel!

December was a very busy month for us.  Sales were much improved because of Christmas.  So I expected January’s sales to be very minimal and to my surprise they were much better than I expected.  The Staples prize has allowed us to advertise on Facebook and our number of new likes during January was about 200 per day which has given us so much exposure to new people that the sales during the month of January were up more than I would have thought.  The best part was that almost all the sales were new customers, so I’m so happy to welcome many new customers to our Downs Designs’ family!

January gave me a little bad news, we didn't win the Chase $250,000 grant.  I was so hoping we could have landed the grant but it wasn't in the cards.  But something else happened by the end of January that took away the disappointment.  Huffington Post did a story on Down Designs!  OMG it was more valuable than money.
 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/24/downs-designs-karen-bowersox_n_4660060.html


They posted the story on Friday, January 24 and by Saturday out website crashed.  Our site couldn't handle all the traffic.  By Sunday morning Eric had successfully moved our site to a bigger server and new orders started coming in.  We posted a sale on February 2 and that week we topped our best month in just eleven days.  I’m still digging my way out of the stacks of orders.    

That weekend our Facebook page “likes” jumped up 4,000 people and the emails and comments on Facebook and Twitter were nearly impossible to keep up with.  News stories and Blogs were writing all about Downs Designs.  Fox 8 came out and did a great story and ran it 5 or 6 times.  Radio stations called me and I was interviewed on several.  I've had a few Skype interviews and even an online paper in London, England interviewed me and did a story.  What an exciting time at Downs Designs.

The next really exciting news is my NBZ Jeans.  They are being delivered to us right now.  I expect our first order to arrive in about 2 weeks.  We got a sample of the finished pants and I’m amazed!  They look and feel fantastic.  So far they fit everyone I've been able to put them on.  I only got two pair as samples, a size 38 waist and 40 waist.  I’d post pictures but I want to wait until we launch them.   

I am seeking outside funding for this new brand and preparing to find investors.  NBZ has a potential market of millions and millions of men who may need help with dressing due to one disability or another or there may be men who just want a comfortable, stylish pair of jeans … which will open up the market to so many more. 

We've also decided to market them on Amazon as well.  We’ll market them as elastic waist jeans with no buttons or zippers and there is not much else available so I think Amazon may be an awesome outlet for us. 


Well, I think I managed to cover all the updates without writing a novel.   I’ll be writing again much sooner!  There will much more news to share once the new jeans arrive!