In the studio my confidence is growing in leaps and bounds with both the soldering and the design of the pieces and I am really looking forward to doing some ‘freelance’ pieces again after the orders are done.
As for business I met a couple of people in the past few weeks I want to mention:
The first is Tina of Kuckilura
www.Kuckilura.se, who is a mum and sews hats and jackets and clothes. She organized one of the Christmas markets that I went to and a couple of friends were in and I bought a fab little hat for my niece (no pics yet as it’s a Christmas prezzie surprise ;o) ).
The other person was Sarah from Country Living
http://www.storegardencountryliving.com/. She is originally from the UK and has lived here in Sweden for 20 odd years now. Her store and café is only 45 minute drive from where I live and we visited this weekend, what an inspiration! All the things that are wonderful and come from the UK (not just the UK either) have been rooted out by Sarah and brought back to this adorable place in the Swedish countryside not to mention the Peony fragrance hand soap and lotion which I am going back for at the first chance I get. Even the clothes, which I thought would be the same as any other place really, were from many different countries and the Norway brands were FAB! She has Angora and Cashmere items which are trendy and very reasonably priced. If you can imagine bringing together the items that you think are the best from all the places you ever have been too, but only the best ones, and then put them all together in a house….that is Country Living.
Both ladies have been inspirational for me and more connections in this new country and new life. I have decided as a result of one of the conversations with Tina that I will purchase a service for a Swedish shop now instead of running my Etsy shop to sell on. I like the fact that Etsy can reach more people and is commercially better known but I am not a commercial seller and I need to ensure that both I and my customers get the best service available and that means being as simple as possible. For a customer in the UK or Sweden to buy something in US dollars only for me to have to change it back to SEK again is crazy not to mention costly so I am working on getting the SEK based web shop up and running ASAP. I will keep the Etsy shop there but I will not be actively promoting it as much as the Swedish shop. I am still focused on building my clientele within Europe first……Europe first, the world second (and I am not the only small business with big ideas either huraaahhh).
So no pictures of jewelry this week, more of Christmas things ;o)
Have a great week and hopefully see you again next Monday.
Hi Kate! I feel very honored beeing mentioned in your blogg. Thanks a million ;-) and hope to see you soon again.
ReplyDeleteTake care / Tina