We started this year so positive with lots of ambitious plans to grow Springbok crafts and started so well with our 'You asked, we delivered' blog back in February, around the same time we also planned a vacation to Sardinia Italy as a nice treat for my 40th birthday which didn't last long. Since then the world has changed into a different place, we find ourselves dealing with new challenges every day as we fumble through various rules and regulations with the global economy suffering as a result.
I've never had to home school before, whilst running a business, and it is fair to say that the schooling came before the business, family always come first as I'm sure you'll agree. Similarly, we are a social business and find ourselves at places like Gloucester Quays Christmas markets, the Frome Cheese Show and Dorset Steam Fair where we are currently best in show! and now hold that title for an extra year as a result of the situation we now find ourselves in. We do, however, remain positive. Thankful that every day we are healthy, smiling and have each other accepting this new norm. We do however need to continue providing quality services to our customers.
Plan B: So what do we do, not being able to go and visit the great shows we had only found in the past few years? we need a plan b! The only platform we have to push our handmade products is our online store, Etsy, and lately Amazon (which is impossible to use), we never got round to making an eBay shop but that'll come in due course, we've also tried 'Not on the High Street' too. These all bring their own challenges with different requirements in listings, needing hashtags, different description character counts, image size requirements and the list goes on. Oh well what the heck, we've got plenty of time on our hands. So for us, as mentioned earlier we remain positive we have a bright future with lots going for us and a plan to expand our products not only here on our homepage but across the other platforms too. We aim to bolt on some new products and adding in some bundled items to our existing product set, bundling items such as the baby birthing blankets, the famous book cushions, and some new silver plated items for those special occasions such as baby's first tooth, baby's first curl and are generally expanding overall to non-embroidered items that complement the existing items nicely. We do also have some exciting new fabric 'Harris Tweed' which is extremely high quality being all hand woven. With this new fabric, we have made some customer glasses cases, purses and are considering making laptop and tablet sleeves for iPad and Android devices made to order with custom sizes.
We could always use a helping hand, so if you're a regular follower of our blogs we would very much appreciate you sharing them and helping support local businesses. We tried to blog previously about handmade versus brand made, and whilst we had a small number of views we did get some personal messages of encouragement which reassures us we are doing the right thing for the right audiences. Any sharing, liking commenting always goes a long way for us, similar pushing people to our social pages like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. So please help if you can and have time.
The summary of this blog is, keep safe, enjoy your lockdown with your nearest and dearest, make use of the free tools out there such as meet.simwood.com for the video replacements where you can't see people in person. Keep positive, support local where you can and make the best out of a bad situation, hunker down and this will all blow over if we obey the rules. As always thanks for reading, if you've got any questions or would like us to commission a special item please do get in touch.
Many thanks
Sarah
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