My Favorite Pizza Recipe

Running a business turns you into a thrifty person. Especially in this economical climate. My husband and I cook a lot more, and buy in bulk now. Which is really not our style. I'm a horrible cook. But one thing I do love to make (and make weekly!) is home made pizza! We make it Neopolitan Style and just dump the ingredients into our bread machine. (The secret is the cake flour!)

1 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 1/4 cups warm water (105 to 115 degrees F)
1 cup cake flour (not self-rising)
2 1/2 to 3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
Olive oil for the bowl

Turn your oven up all the way and pre-bake the crust and sauce for a few minutes before adding your toppings. We usually make a fresh tomato sauce in the blender. Super Easy! Or we have a white pizza and sprinkle it with red pepper flakes! Mmmmm.

Today I'm having the leftover dough from last night as a mini pizza with leftover blender sauce, mozzarella, and fresh cilantro. Cilantro is my favorite.

Wedding Season!

Last week was a good week for reminiscing about weddings for me. Besides celebrating my own wedding anniversary on the 19th, I have two necklaces going down the aisle on the necks of blushing brides. How exciting! I'd like to do more wedding orders, because it would be easy for me to make duplicate or similar jewelry for an entire bridal party.

My own wedding was a handmade affair, partially because I'm extremely picky and wanted everything to be my exact vision, and partially because we didn't have $27,000 to spend on a party. We rented a bed and breakfast in the country with a beautiful extensive garden. Everything was handmade from the wedding dress, the flowers arrangements, the invitations, down to the paper cranes folded by the wedding guests which still grace our home for good luck and fond memories of our perfect wedding celebration.

What do you do to increase your productivity?

In order to get into some good business habits, I'm going to work on increasing my productivity. What I really need is a studio with a door that can be closed to shut out the computer, the world, and this little helper in the photo. That isn't possible yet so I came up with some other solutions. My action plan includes

• Using a timer to control my time online. Promoting is good but I can get really sucked in.

• Getting up, exercising, showering, getting dressed right away instead of staying in my p.j.'s until I go to the Post Office.

• Making duplicate items in batches, which will be faster and I can stay in my routine, plus I won't have to pull the supplies out multiple times.

Other great suggestions from the Etsy community included

• Using Flock browser so you can handle your RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, e-mails etc. all at once
  

• Keeping your promoting and your creating separate. I.E. promoting during the day and creating at night when things are quieter.

• Keep great records so that you know exactly where you are in terms of profit and loss, supplies, sales trends ect. Then you know exactly where you need to be focusing.

• Create a daily Must Do list that incorporates both housework and business goals. Plan your week and your goals in advance.
  

Meet My New Boss

In spite of the fact that I'm a pretty driven person, left to my own devices I have a tendency to use my time in a less than efficient manner. Especially when it comes to the internet. I like to stay current with my web site views, who's added me to their favorites, check the e-mail... read the forums.....okay. Maybe it's an obsession. Maybe I check these things constantly... re-loading the page over and over after I've just added a new item to my shop... hungry for the approval and views of my customers....

So I realize I have this problem. And especially now, when I'm getting my shop in shape for the holiday season (i.e. have added lots more tasks to my workload) I need to address it and build better habits for the future.

So meet my new boss!
The super annoying clicking countdown and shrill alarm will definitely keep my mind on getting the job done. I'm going to budget my time while having my tea in the morning and then try to stick to the budget as much as possible.

Quitting my Day Job...Again

I realized that I really needed to get a part time job to help bring in a little extra money and ease the stress of building my business. It takes a lot of time to build up a following and I was a little naive... or a little over confident? It will happen for me. It's happening right now! But anyway... I got a job from February through June part time hostessing in a restaurant in my neighborhood. This gave me time to start to build up my customer base and experiment with different ways to promote.

I'll talk about promoting a little bit later. It's super important even though you may not see results right away and feel like giving up.

But now my sales are at a point where I can make more money by focusing on and influencing my sales than by spending time at my part time job.

The Backstory

Here are the lost posts which include the dramatic events of me struggling with the ugly reality of how hard it is to begin to build a business.

an update on Damselle and my life in general

I have a lot of friends who are important to me even though I don't talkt o them every day...or month...and I thought I'd start a blog so I can communicate on certain things which are happening without having to relay the info over and over, and most likely forgeting some people.

So recently, witin the last 6 months, I started selling my handmade jewelry collection on etsy.com , and after our trip to Boston, Jason and I felt pretty bad about not having it together with our goals, like we were wasting our lives focusing on the teahouse and not getting anywhere, when in the big picture we really just wanted to work for ourselves, spend more time together, and live a more deliberate and meaningful existence. So when we got back, we decided to take more risks in order to get back on track with what we really want to do with our lives. Our first experiment was the antique mall, which does okay and provides us with a little more cash to work with in our budget, but isn't going to support anyone on it's own. We like being antique dealers though. It makes us more interesting.

I started selling my jewelry at sparrowfish on high street, and was getting generally good feedback from everyone I showed my collection to. Around that time, The Bombay Company anounced they were closing, so I decided to take the plunge and start doing jewelry making full time. I lined up craft shows for every weekend through the holidays, and my last day of employment at Bombay was last thursday.

I had my first show yesterday in Cinncinatti. It was from 9-4 at Sycamore High School. (yeah.. all the really big shows book 6 months in advance) I wasn't really sure what to expect, especially since it was a high school, but the show was actually pretty big. I was pleased because I think I made really good choices with my displays and my signage, and looked very striking and professional in general. I do have to figure out something to make my banner more rigid. I was also really happy that I took the step to facilitate credit card transactions, because that really drove our business. (jason worked the show with me) One thing that did impair our sales was the fact that all the jewelry merchants were lined up along one wall. What a bad decision! In general, I got really good feedback from everyone, with the most constant comment being that my jewelry was completely different from everything else being offered at the show. One weird thing that everyone wanted was matching earring/necklace sets. Every time I had earrings to match a necklace, they automatically bought both. I'm going to have to make sure I take more advantage of that. I was also told that I would do really well at the high end juried shows, which was good because I was concerned about whether I was ready for that or not. I ended up doing about $700, which would have been higher if I wasn't part of Jewelry Row, but still not bad for 7 hours at a high school. I was really excited when I got home, because I had two more sales on my website from people who had been at the craft show the same day, and 8 people from the show had added me to their favorite merchants on etsy. I wasn't counting on having that much of an impact on my web sales from a show. I also talked to some people at the show about doing consignment. So yay.

Today I'm spending time updating my etsy page since it's going to be more important than expected, and trying to organize my stuff, which is a complete disaster right now. I have a two day show in lancaster next Friday and Saturday. And that's that. Hopefully I won't have to take up waitressing in January, if i'm willing to work hard enough. we'll see.

Fighting Depression and The Man.

First of all, if anyone actually reads this you might notice that I had to move all my old blogs because hotblog is shutting down. How irritating.

Don’t read this if you are considering starting your own business.

Also, you might have noticed that I haven’t really been seeing anyone or returning anyone’s calls or generally being a decent human being. sorry. Things haven’t been so great for me recently. It’s hard for me to talk about it because i have a tendency to want to breeze over these sorts of issues in my life and… honestly I don’t like for people to see me struggle. But I’m going to go ahead and tell you what’s been going on so that I’m forced to do better. It would be totally humiliating for me to anounce that I had some really rough things to work through and then not actually be able to come out on top.

So anyway. Damselle isn’t supporting me and I’ve run up some debt trying to make it float. Which isn’t really surprising except that I really *wanted* things to go differently. I guess I’ll just have to work hard like everyone else. My stress and Jason’s stress has caused a lot of problems in our relationship, and I’ve been downright depressed. *really depressed*. It’s been pretty ugly. We came up with a plan over the summer for how we were going to take the plunge and do the things we loved, and then.... when it appears that you can’t actually do those things… what then? We’ve been stumbling around in a numb and miserable stupor with our hearts broken and without a plan.

I’m trying to rally though. I feel pretty fiercely about my jewelry designs, and I live and die by the amazing feedback I get from the people who are actually buying my jewelry. A huge percentage of them are repeat customers. Most people who buy jewelry from me buy multiple items. I had a woman who purchased a piece last week and as soon as she received it today she went online and bought another necklace from me. She told me she’s addicted. This sort of strong customer loyalty makes me think “wait.. I can’t give up on this, somebody thinks I have talent. I have value to somebody!”

And the idea of being a leader is also important to me. I need to be personally responsible for the choices I make. Being a small business owner, instilling the value of buying handmade items from real people who spend a lot of time and skill making a product in a way which is positive for the community and the environment. If you want to change the world, start a business.

I don’t even know if I’m being stupid and completely denying the fact that I’m not successful, in a situation where I need to cut my losses and move on. But I’m really angry about the idea of being defeated by the evil corporate consumerism rotten dreamless wal-mart infested world.

So I’m trying to pull it together. I’m still probably going to have to get a full-time job.. which I don’t even want to think about right now, despite the fact that Jason will be really frustrated if I don’t find one soon… I’ve spent lots and lots of hours doing social networking trying to build my business. Which is the advice that all the successful businesses have given me.

Here are the links to some of my sites

Please click here to go directly to my storefront!
My Etsy Shop

Please click here to become my friend on Myspace!
Damselle Myspace Page

Damselle Squidoo Lense

and my screen name on flickr is damselle.

so we’ll see. i dunno.

An Update on Damselle That Is Nicer to Read


So I definitely knew going into the “after Christmas” season that things would be slow. And they were really slow. And I totally freaked out because I’m investing so much time and money and belief in the world being a good place. Things were not so good.

However, I’ve been working very, very hard and things are picking up. I had a show at the Cincinnati Museum Center last weekend which was a very positive ($$) experience for me. My ad campaign has also been highly effective. I have a target amount of money I need to make in a week in order for Damselle to be my only job. Between the show and the money my ad campaign brought in the door at Etsy, I actually made the target last week. And it’s still February. And I’m still learning. And my business is still growing.

I plan on getting a part time job to help pay off my debt and take some of the “performance pressure” off of Damselle. But I feel fairly confident that I will get Damselle to a place where it can be my only job.

Also, the Columbus Jazz Orchestra. Jason and I went to see a performance by them at the Southern Theater last week and were absolutely moved to tears by a horn solo. Check them out. They’re something special. We’ll probably donate money to them this year.

I can’t wait for spring, how about you?