I thought I ought to put in a plug for the new fabrics that have arrived here recently. (I’m on a first-name basis with our letter carrier, the UPS guy, and the FedEx driver!) I’ve gone completely overboard on spring fabric buying. I think it must be the disgusting weather we’re having — it’s April 4th, and it’s snowing outside now. I am so ready for spring! If I can’t have it outside, at least I can stock fabrics that make me think of spring and summer!

There are new Solarveil colors in stock — green, blue, pink, and more white, in addition to the turquoise I already had. I will also be getting yellow and beige very soon; because I buy my Solarveil through the co-op, it can take a little longer, but I think that being able to offer the slings at a much-reduced price makes them worth the wait
I’ve added my new tencel/linen blends to the store. There are 7 colors, including a few bright, cheerful ones, and I think this will be a terrific summer fabric. Linen and tencel both wick sweat away from the skin, and the blend will wrinkle less than pure linen, in addition to being softer than new pure linen.

I also have several fabrics that have not been added to the site yet — these unique cotton/linen blends:

The cotton/linen blend slings will be $37, like the tencel/linen blends above.

and these stunning selendangs from Project HUGS, which I will be sewing like regular slings (cut to length and/or hemmed, hit and run blackjackjeux flash casinoonline black jackjack black moviesslots onlinecasino jeux toulousewww casino gratuites combonus de casino en ligneregles de la rouletteenquete casino on netwww jeux casino comjeux de casino gratuisjeux de cartes casinobonus sans depot pour casinoroulette anglaise,gagner à la roulette anglaise en ligne,la roulette anglaisevideo poker en lignewww casino dowww geant casino frle casino machine à sous gratuitescertificat bonus casinosuper slots casinomeilleurs jeux de casinojeu roulette gratuitesjeux keno en lignecasino bonus partycomment gagner a la roulettejeu au casinojeu casino machinecasino jeux de tabletableau black jackwww produits casino frjeu poker casinocasino jeux en francebaccarat room en lignejeux online poker tourpoker en ligne sans argenttelecharger poker superstarsjeu carte pokerstreap poker gratuitesjeu de cartes pokertelecharger party pokerdes règles du poker texas holdempoker tour en lignejouer au poker sur macpoker gratuites sur macpoker en ligne 3djeu de poker pour pclogiciel de poker gratuitesjouer au poker en francaisjeu de poker gratuites to my standard slings sizes — they are around 90-96″ long, so there will be enough fabric for accessories, too):

Finished selendang slings will be $40, and that includes a $5 donation to HUGS.
I hope to add those to the site tonight or tomorrow, as time allows.

I also have a new luxury fabric — a hemp/silk blend — which will be perfect for formal spring occasions, summer weddings, and wearing around the house with jeans and a t-shirt! I have four colors — ecru, midnight, icy blue, and pale pink. The fabric is really cool — one side is shiny, like satin, and the other side is matte, almost like linen in its weave.

I’ll be sewing them with the компютри hems in, so that the shiny side shows as a border on the tail (which will be the matte side, to keep the sling from slipping on your shoulder). It’s been prewashed, so no worries about baby using the tail as a lovey… which s/he almost certainly will do, given the blankie-like softness of the satin side. Because of the price of the fabric and the difficulty of sewing a satiny fabric, these will be priced at $85, but will include insurance within the US.

I’m seriously running out of space for fabric here. Oh, for a house with a dedicated sewing room…

I’ve been in business since 2000, give or take a few months. For the year after Stephen was born, I continued to work (right next to my husband!) at UNH in the Space Science Group, for which I did outreach and website design. After 12 months of that, though, the grant I was working under ran out, and Stephen — now crawling and no longer content to sit and play while I worked — needed more stimulation and space, so I started working from home. At first, I just kept on doing freelance web design, with an (extremely!) occasional sling sale thrown in. But word of mouth increased my sales to a point that I needed more than a single web page with email contact info to sell my slings, so I built a sling-selling portion of my site.

And, I am ashamed to admit, I did it badly.

My biggest mistake was bashing my “competition”. I think this is a mistake that many new businesses make — unsure of their own product’s worth, they feel it’s necessary to compare it with another, usually putting down the other in the process. In my text, I had some comparison between my overlapping pleats and the MayaWrap accordion fold, saying something to the effect that my pleats were far more comfortable, and my sling was cheaper. Well, sure it was cheaper — I didn’t have to pay weavers, seamstresses, management, distributors, and suppliers! [You can read more about equitable pricing here.] And while I found my overlapping pleats to be more comfortable, there was no guarantee that would be true for everyone — and indeed, women with smaller shoulders may well find the accordion-pleated style to be a better fit for them.

I also didn’t price my slings intelligently. Because we were living on one income — my husband’s salary, which at the time was just enough to meet our needs — I couldn’t myself pay more than $25 for a carrier. The MayaWrap pouch I had bought before Stephen was born was about the most I could afford (at the time, I think it was around $28). And making slings seemed so easy, and the material I had bought was pretty inexpensive, and I was buying macramé rings wholesale… so I think my initial selling price was around $15, with $3.85 shipping. Even that felt like a lot — heck, the materials cost about $5 for each sling, so hypothetically, I was making a $10 profit, right? Well, not really. Like many WAHMs starting out, I neglected to pay myself for my time. I would spend at least 30 minutes with each customer (usually via email) working out their sling’s details, not to mention the time spent cutting and sewing the sling. And while it may not seem like a big deal when you’re first starting out, your time really is valuable, and you deserve to be paid for it. When I compared my $10 profit to the amount of time I was putting into each sling, I was barely making minimum wage — not the best use of my time, given that I was also taking care of my son.

Now, 5 years later, I’m still selling some inexpensive slings, but they are essentially subsidized by the more expensive ones. If I made only $20 slings, I would quickly burn out — as much as I love helping *all* mothers wear their babies, it’s tough to spend a day sewing, replying to emails, etc. and then not having more than a few dollars per hour to show for it.

These are honest mistakes, and ones that I think the majority of small businesses end up making, if they don’t know better. I’ve seen some more egregious examples, too, unfortunately. I won’t name names, but one of my favorite companies — without whom I would have no business at all — was recently the target of a new startup competitor. This competitor filled their website with half-truths and deceit about the original company. They bought a domain name that was identical to my favorite company’s domain name, except that they registered .org instead of .com, and then put up a comparison between the two that was supposed to look unbiased, but was, again, full of half-truths and deceit. Luckily, my favorite company has a long history in the babywearing world, plenty of friends, and in the end, their sales have actually increased since the competitor came on the scene. Not because they felt sorry for my favorite company, but because they saw what the alternative was, and did not like the way the alternative was presented.

The moral of the story, to me, is that potential customers recognize moral behavior, and reward it with their purchases. While I don’t believe in any sort of magical karma, I have seen time and again that you harvest what you sew. If you treat your competition with the respect and consideration, your potential customers will see that, and know that you will treat them with the same respect. It’s far more constructive to point out what’s good and interesting and unique about your own product. Rather than saying “My overlapping pleats are more comfortable than accordion pleats!”, I now have a much lengthier paragraph that basically says it’s best to try a few styles to determine what’s the most comfortable for you. If your whole website is devoted to bringing down other similar products, what is that saying about you and your product?

Those are two of the mistakes I have learned from in my business, and I hope that this entry will help others avoid making them.

In the past year — from 6 April, 2006 through today — I have spent over $5000 ($5178.90, to be exact) on rings from SlingRings.com. Well, that includes shipping, too, so the rings themselves are somewhat less than that. That is a lot of rings. I’m just curious enough to tabulate them.

You can certainly see what I use the most of — with the majority of my fabrics, large aluminum rings are key for adjustability. For Solarveil, I use small aluminum or nylon. I get a lot fewer requests for nylon than aluminum — probably because aluminum is so much prettier, although I do find nylon to be easier to adjust through.

Wow… so I guess this means I’ve sewn around 1500 slings since this time last year (since I haven’t used all of them up, and the totals above include 250 I just ordered today).

That’s a lot of slings!

Went into Boston today — it’s about an hour from us, so we tend to go on day trips every few weeks or so. After many visits of being unable to go to my favorite little mill-end fabric store (that’s where fabric mills send the short ends of rolls they haven’t sold to others, and the fabric can then be bought at less-than-wholesale prices by the public), we finally made it over.

Unfortunately, the store is closing soon. It’s been a staple for Boston residents and visitors alike for at least a few decades, but now, it’s going out of business. The owner seemed sad enough about the closing already, so I didn’t press him for details about why he had to close, but I would guess that it’s getting harder and harder to sell discount fabric due to the number of chain stores that carry it, and their increasing reliance on fabrics from China and India, which are often far less expensive than those from Europe and the Americas. The mills that he’s been getting his rolls from might have closed, or they might have moved offshore — I don’t know for certain. All I do know is that this great little store will shortly be no more.

Now, I’m not averse to a bargain — I do a fair amount of hunting around to find inexpensive yet quality fabrics for my store, and I’m sure that some of my fabrics do come from China, India, and other Asian suppliers. That’s pretty much a fact of life in business today, and I won’t bemoan it overly if it means that I can sell a sling to someone who might not otherwise be able to afford it. But the downside of cheap labor and the exported goods it produces is that often, those goods come at the expense of local jobs and businesses.

It’s a real quandry for me, honestly. I hate to see any worker lose his or her job, whether it’s here or in India or anywhere else. Ultimately, we all do what we need to survive. It’s harder to watch when the casualties are close to home, of course. I don’t know the owner of Clement Textiles very well, but I’ve been a customer for three years — not much, in the grand scheme of things, but I still care for him as a person, and hope that he is able to make a new life for himself and his family after his business closes.

I believe in fair trade and fair wages. I don’t mind buying fabric from China, India, or anywhere else, if it’s being made under good conditions… but it’s hard to know for sure. I have no idea where most of my fabrics are actually milled, nor how to find out. I wish that I could buy only fabrics that I knew were being fairly produced and traded; maybe someday, I’ll be at that point. But that will certainly be the end of my inexpensive slings, since you can’t pay an American worker a fair wage *and* get an inexpensive product out of it. For now, I have to settle for not knowing, and being able to sell slings at what are, for the market, inexpensive prices, and just let the quandry sit.

Hurray!!!!

After one heart-stopping moment — uploaded the changed pages, saw AWFULNESS!!! — I figured out everything!

The site doesn’t look any different, but it’s going to be a lot easier for me to update, particularly if, as is the case right now, something goes “off” with the points system. I’m going to fix that right now, hopefully.

Until then, YAY! I’m getting better at PHP!

After redoing the look and feel of SlingRings (which I had originally designed back in 2003? I think it was? and then another company made some changes, put in a PHP shopping cart, and went out of business, and then Rochelle hired me again), I decided to use more PHP stuff on my own site. I’ve already changed all the page names over to php, so that I could show how many points were left; and then, after seeing how powerful PHP could be in the SlingRings site (the newer designer used it to basically build the pages on the fly), I thought I ought to do that on my site, too.

Unfortunately, Dreamweaver doesn’t really want to play nice, and it’s making trouble for me. I thought I’d take a shortcut and use the templates I’ve already been using to add the PHP info, but it doesn’t like the syntax. Pooh. So I have to cut and paste by hand. And then, HOPEFULLY, it’ll still work! That’ll be the real kicker…

Wish me luck!

Edit: I have closed this post to comments, because I’ve gotten around 50 spam comments today alone Friggin’ spambots.

Here’s what kept me busy in November (the last complete month — i.e. no long vacations, etc.). (more…)

Although organic fabrics are quite expensive, and therefore don’t really fit in with my goal of making slings affordable to everyone, they do make me feel much more environmentally-conscious, and I hope that others feel that way, too. I have a semi-limited selection right now of organic prints, and am slowly working to increase the number of options I can offer. I just received 20 yards of beautiful organics from Near Sea Naturals, which I am currently washing (with all-natural soap from Charlie’s) and machine-drying, so they can be worn and used as soon as you get them: no worries about baby chewing on the fabric I’m offering the slings for $49.95, $10 less than the other organics listed — the prints are much more expensive than these plainer fabrics — and my hope is, that’s a price that will appeal to nearly everyone, not just those who can afford to live on organic foods and drive a hybrid. (Not that there is *anything* wrong with that, but I think we all know those are expensive choices to make!)

I will also be offering, in the not-too-distant future, organically-grown and processed twills. The company I buy my stretch twills from is expanding its offerings to include organic fabric, and lightweight twills — my favorite! — are first on the list. I haven’t gotten a price quote yet, or seen what colors they will offer, but I’m hoping they will be both affordable (so that I can offer them for less than $40) and attractive. I’ll keep the blog updated with more information as it becomes available.

All the cool kids have a weblog for their businesses, and my host offers WordPress as a default installation, so why not?

I don’t expect this to be a very exciting blog. Probably I’ll have entries about scoring good deals on fabric; where my business is at any given point; and I suppose I could use it to make announcements… if I ever have any. Maybe I’ll post statistics about sales or use it to highlight other businesses that I feel could use more press We’ll have to see.

Anyway, welcome to the blog — now, back to your regularly-scheduled website.