Well. Ash and I just looooove to plan. And think about our future. And possible avenues for growing/changing/evolving our business. We have these long talks (usually while we're driving) where we do really bad outloud math to try and somehow calculate exactly how much jewelry we need to sell so that we can do w/x/y/z (pay off the mortgage before Ash is 40/employ our whole family to work for us/buy a yacht and sail around the world/invent a cure for sea sickness so that I can go on that sailing trip).
But, we also have talks about how we love our life right now and we need to focus on enjoying this time with the boys before they get all gobbled up by school and sports and sleepovers. Ash has these really amazing thoughts about how it's a bit of a trap to always want to grow, grow, grow and I'm all, "yeah, live in the now! let's write a gratitude journal!" BUT, what about seizing the day and making hay while the sunshines and hatching chickens to count?
It's not like we want to make a bazillion dollars and cut down all the trufulla trees to make Range Rovers, we want to do cool stuff! We want to help the people we love do cool stuff too. Also? We want to try new things and push our boundaries and learn new stuff and teach other people stuff. On the other hand, we're scared. We're scared to over-commit ourselves. We're scared we're going to somehow end up exchanging the parts of the business we love doing for jobs we don't really want to do. Also, what happens if we can no longer support these other people we've roped into our business? What if things get a bit out of hand and we over-commit and are suddenly grumpy and tired and totally stressed out?
We did that once, we opened a cafe that WE LOVED, but also had a baby and rapidly growing jewelry business and we held on by the skin of our teeth, but dude, that was a hard couple of years. A hard couple of years that I wouldn't trade for anything. Soooooo, we're back here again and we're ready and not pregnant and not starting another business and we're excited to really get stuck into some new ways of working that we haven't tried before.
We love the idea of being able to produce new designs on a more regular basis and give them the energy and attention they need so that more people get to see them besides me and Ash and Siggy and Henry. We want to try our hand at getting more wholesale accounts and working into designing seasonal collections. We would like to travel a bit more and visit potential galleries and shops (we're looking at you, Pacific Northwest!).
We're going to try and let go of some of the little things so that we have time to focus on the big things. We're going to do this without giving up on our core value of hand making all of our pieces with the upmost consideration for sourcing ethical materials and staying in incredibly close contact with all of our individual customers. We still have a lot of thinking and planning and dodgy math to do to map out exactly how it's all going to go down, so we'll keep you in the loop!