Adirondack Patterns:The Growth of A Handmade Business
This week we reached some HUGE milestones as small business owners. We celebrated our Fourth Year in
Business, almost reached the 3000 sales mark, obtained over 750 Facebook Followers, and have over 1200 ETSY followers! All with picture perfect feedback!!!
It is amazing how far that we have come, and how much our business has grown.
Here are the sales for our first month in business March-April 2010 a whopping 12 sales!
Slowly
but surely we sold 198 orders for that year, and added a few more
patterns to the shop. In total we had approximately 30 patterns in the
shop by our first year anniversary.
Exciting right?
2011
was a landmark year! I had a new baby, Hayden, and therefore we had a new muse!
We inundated our fledgling shop with new patterns, inspired by that
babe.
Julia's Waldorf doll
patterns became more coveted and perfected, and we started advertising a
bit with various blogs who emulated what we liked, or thought we would
be a good fit with them.
Here are some of the patterns born that year!
The
advertising worked, and the views of our shop for 2011-2012 year were
over 57,000! Sales totaled 652 for that year alone~and business was as
they say...booming!
More exciting, right?
Well, little did we know, 2012-2013 would be the biggest year yet!
Our traffic increased to over 90,000 hits, and our sales were over 800 orders!
Advertising
continued to be our major source of traffic for 2012-2013 with a
majority of the traffic coming from buttons we had on lovely blogs like Rhythm of The Home, Small Things, French Press Knits, and Smashed Peas and Carrots.
Julia's Waldorf Doll Patterns seemed to be the "it" pattern for simple
Waldorf Dolls, and word of mouth spread in the Waldorf World! Ravelry
turned out to be a huge traffic source for our crochet patterns as well.
We were selling internationally, with one of our biggest countries of
sales being Australia!
We started a Facebook Page to help obtain more fans, and spread the word of mouth in the social media forum.
Now we have over 750 fans!!!
The
feedback we received over the years was crucial to the success of our
shop, we love to hear what people have to say about our patterns!
After much research, and soul searching we decided to put handmade swaddle and baby dolls in the shop in 2013!
Here are a few of the babes we sold!
A custom order
The end of 2013 was a bit rocky. After a family tragedy and a decline in health of a loved one we found that we had less and less time for doll making and pattern creating, so we decided to just let the shop "do it's thing.
That left a hole in our creative lives and opened up a door that had been closed a few years ago. One of our passions that we had let go by the wayside ... craft fairs!!!!!
So we pulled out our goodies, and whipped up some cute little babies to sell locally!
I also decided to begin selling hats and cozies made from my own patterns.
Julia made some precious little baby ornaments too!
And so we craft faired!!!
The craft fairs and the feedback we received was amazing. It made us realize that we really want to sell our goods locally, but make it on our own time.
Family and kids are our main focus these days. If the creative, or crafty bug bites and we have the time then we would love to do the occasional craft fair, or put some sweet babes in the shop.
We
are very excited for what the future has to bring! More creativity, a
little more love, and many more little babies and goodies to ponder, and of course
meeting more new customers!
Thanks for liking us, and for reading this. Your support is so encouraging!
As a thank you, please use our 20% discount coupon code on any orders from our shop through the weekend!
Enter code FOUR20 at checkout.
Sincerely, Laura and Julia
