2009..year in review

OK. This blogging thing is really NOT that easy. I'm learning it takes serious discipline to update it regularly and with the new year, I will try harder to do just that. So here is a recap of last year's happenings with my business.

Early in the year, I started experimenting with a new product. Hooded bath towels! Well, maybe it's not really a new product but I sought out to make it a better product. When Sammie was a baby, I used those little bath towels with the triangular top and remembered how awful they were. They were too thin, too small, and not absorbent at all! So I searched the web for better materials and came up with organic Turkish cotton terry cloth! It's very pricey but worth it. It rivals with Egyptian cotton and is so thick and luxurious. I created an extra large hooded towel measuring 30" by 40"! I gave it to friends to test out and made adjustments here and there based on their feedback.

In May, armed with my new product, I paid a couple hundred dollars (which is the most I've ever spent on a table fee) to take part in the SF Baby Fair. I was really excited and optimistic, believing that THIS was my demographic. Affluent, eco-minded parents-to-be. I sold a handful of bibs but not a single hooded bath towel. I didn't even make enough to cover my table fee so in terms of sales, it was a total failure. But on the other hand, I made a couple of great contacts which shaped how the rest of my year would turn out.

From the SF Fair and previous fairs, I learned one really important thing about my product, the bibs in particular. Since they serve a very specific function, it takes a bit of show-and-tell for customers to really get it. Experienced parents get it immediately but new parents don't really (to them, a bib is a bib is a bib) because they just haven't experienced that stage of life yet. So experienced parents would be more likely to buy my bib as a gift for their friends. That's my conclusion anyway.

Next, I decided to make a video tutorial of how the bibs work with the intention of posting the video on my website. I enlisted a couple of friends (and a baby) to shoot the video. After weeks of planning and working out everyone's schedules, the video was shot...but that was it. The friend who shot the video is sitting on it and procrastinating so as of today, I still have no tutorial video. That's the "price" you pay when you don't actually pay for it to be professionally done I learned.