Jingle Bells

Christmas has indeed come and I am still shoveling snow daily but it will be a very beautiful and white Christmas here in Sweden. Here is a quick picture of my gingerbread house that I entered in to the competition to win a trip to the Ice Hotel:






The Christmas postage deadlines have past now so the main bulk of orders have been completed and I can safely say that this year I have succeeded in maintaining a balance between too many orders and too little. I will confess that my capacity is not exactly 100% yet but routine is forming in my life and thanks to the launch parties I had enough business to keep me busy up till now and I still have 5-10 orders left to do. I also have a sales day in a shop in Gothenburg at the end of January where I hope to sell items in advance of Valentine’s Day so I have to get going on those items too.

We are rapidly heading for year end (and another new tax nightmare approaching I am sure!) so this is the time I will sit down and go through the plan for 2011, month by month, using my lessons learnt from 2010 to try and improve on all fronts and there is plenty room for improvement.

The first improvement, as mentioned last week is the new Swedish Kroner based website (written in English) the second, a Facebook fan page. I have decided that the shop will be my silverbyk8.se domain page, I have a blog and I will have a FB page too....so that I can keep my personal and private lives separate, as can my friends on FB. I will be looking at my marketing of these sites and networking in and around Sweden primarily (magazine adverts, newspaper adverts, listings at local tourist information offices, local internet company listings, local bloggers, even local jewellery shops to network, network, network). I will also be looking at the UK market too and doing the same.

Whilst networking I will be looking out for shops to sell\display my items too. I have one in Scotland already interested so I will be looking to take them up on the offer as soon as I have items completed. I need to have displays I can show to potential shops to entice them to display my goods and then of course target appropriate shops and industries.

I will look in to partnerships with home party sellers of beauty products and also reaching out to larger companies to give them ideas for gifts to employees etc.

Right, I feel like I need to get going already!!

I will be here again next week......Mondays is working MUCH better for me.