No News is Good News

When was my last blog post? July 9th... Wow.

I truly doubt anyone (but me) reads this blog. Maybe a few family members... maybe. If I had a following, they're obviously not concerned with my lack of entries. But in case you were wondering: I am doing just fine (thanks for asking).

As it would appear, "no news is good news..." And actually, I've gotten a lot done since July (Yey!). Namely, I finally pulled together the Green Cheeks boutique site.
(IT LIVES!!! *muwahaha*)

For those who are used to Twitter entries, it would go something like this:
I've been busy. K thnx.

Details, Anyone?

For the rest of us (with attention spans beyond 140 characters...) there is more. Much more.

July consisted of a lot of "waiting" on new orders. I got the first one from Eberjey. Then I played email volleyball with a designer that had not finished the line of underwear that she promised - which I consequently did not receive anything from until late August.

I also was "waiting" for a web programmer to get back to me about building a custom template for me using Shopify's Vision, since I did not know how to. [In case you were wondering: Shopify is the eCommerce website builder that I use for Green Cheeks] I never heard back from anyone, but I kept up my networking meetings, tinkered with social marketing (yes, Twitter), and even went to the Austin Fashion Week. As it turns out, attending the ATX Fashion Week events was a great idea because I met a lot of new designers, including a lingerie designer and a natural dyer (more on that later).

August was hot. And more so than usual... Austin had a record 3+ months of 100+ degree days. Yuk. Needless to say, it was a slow and painful month. The good part: I received another two orders - one from Jinxedaposed and the other from Mary Green.

Early in August, I also managed to pick up a (short lived) internship with that lingerie designer, for whom I worked an amazing amount of hours (all unpaid), only to be dropped from my learning experience because of funding issues - essentially she couldn't hire me (= pay me!), so she told me the internship was over. Damn economy.

During the time that I was working for her, I put building the Green Cheeks website on the back burner - thinking that I was receiving better industry-related experience by absorbing as much information and skills from her as I could. But in an awesome turn of events (and ironically, the same week that I was let go from the internship), Shopify got 10x easier to use. They introduced more a user-friendly website builder (as in, more friendly for the CSS programming inept, like myself).

So I could not resist pouring over my plans for the website and actually build it myself! It was not too bad (probably 30 or so hours of development) - but that leads me into September.

For September, I recieved (part of) an order that I placed with Eko-Lab when I visited NYC. With that, I finally had enough stuff to put up on the website. More importantly, I had enough time to do a photo session and finish building the website (among a few other things).
I also set up:

• An Etsy Shop (nothing on it, yet),
• A Facebook Fan Page for Green Cheeks,
• PayPal and Google Checkout merchant accounts,
• set up a P.O. Box (for orders - don't want the crazies knowing where I live!), and
• I got a business cell phone (yep, rationalized that one... lol).

Phew! So Green Cheeks is on it's way to being more popular (I hope). The next few weeks will be all about optimizing the website, or SEO stuff. And I've also started making my own line of knickers, but that will take time to plan out and learn about manufacturing. It's all new to me!

It's always nice to have a sense of accomplishment. And since it's Sunday (yeah, I work on the weekends too), I think I am going to take the rest of the day off! Ciao!