Still Going!! I Swear!!

Yep…. Definitely not good at writing a blog! Here we are with only a few updates this calendar year, not great. Excuses abound, but it just hasn’t been a priority! I’ll try to do better, but honestly, I can’t promise anything, time is at a premium at this point!
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When I last updated the 100K project in May, we had just started our newest venture, our “With the Grain Weddings” company. We had spent almost all our money on a small, used, hobby style laser that we started to use to engrave products, specializing in custom/personalized wedding favors, and had just received our first couple of small orders. 

At first, it was a struggle to keep up. I was trying to fulfill orders at the same time as learning both basic graphic design and running a laser engraving machine. None of these things are particularly difficult alone, but juggling all at once (while also working a full time professional career and raising a family) was quite the time crunch! We started to see some nice traction on our shop, though, and that was encouraging. The biggest issue for us was the time it took to engrave the products (this machine was not particularly fast), and what to do if the older, used machine broke down for whatever reason (luckily, my technical background lent itself to me being able to fix the machine, but the down time was killing us!).  As our orders picked up, we quickly made addressing these production issues a priority. This meant buying another used hobby machine, which we found within driving distance for under $2,000. Not too bad! And we were piling up assets!

Once we got that machine up and running (the learning curve was much steeper on machine #2, we were making product within days!), things went a lot more smoothly. We invested our revenue heavily in inventory to shorten lead times (a couple thousand dollars there), a couple laptops and a printer to increase productivity, we added a few more product lines, received a couple dozen 5-star reviews, and started seeing some nice results!

Which brings us to this fall/winter, and our current situation and next steps. At this point, we are firmly in the slowest part of the year for weddings, which allows us to breathe a little bit on fulfilling our orders. I want to make the shop more streamlined and manageable, increase our productivity, and add more products to make sure we are ready to go for the busy wedding season (spring/summer!). Plus, there’s the small item that we are expecting our third child, a baby girl, this December! That’s a LOT to get ready for!

So my goals for the last month and the next couple months are to invest a huge amount of our money into a new machine (it’s a little over $5000 total, and I’ve already paid $1600 of it as a deposit). This new laser engraver is much more powerful, so we can go faster, and it has 4 times the capacity, so it can engrave more items at one time. I think this will be a game changer for us, it will allow us to add new products we weren’t previously capable of, as well as cutting our production time significantly! In addition, I’ve moved our small garage shop into half of our basement, and turned the other half into a play/hangout room for the family. This should allow for some more integrated family/side project time, which will be necessary as both start demanding more time! It also gives me space to have efficient workflow, so fulfillment should be much easier and faster. We’ve invested the rest of our revenue into more inventory and new products/equipment (we’ve bought a CNC vinyl cutter and heat press, more on that later!), basically selling out to “gear up” for a busy 2018. I expect the balance of the 100K project to approach very low numbers over the holidays as we continue investing, but I think it’s going to pay off big-time.

Since we’ve started in May, our little Etsy shop has generated almost $20,000 in sales! After materials, shipping, and advertising/payment/seller fees, we operate at about 50% profit (if you don’t count our time, of course)… this means that we plan to invest almost $10,000 by the end of the year in inventory, equipment, and materials. Heading into January, we will have approximately $9,500 in equipment and more than $7,000 of revenue in inventory, ready to take a full and aggressive swing at 2018 to really try and see what this little venture can be. I think with some advertising boosts, a whole portfolio of products, and an up-and-running shop, the grown we see this year could really be huge!!

So stay tuned (and signup for our email list if you’d like! We RARELY email but you will stay in the loop on progress!), I think it could be an exciting year. We are quickly exiting the “how to make a buck” phase and entering the “how to launch and grow a small side business” phase, and it’s getting big fast!

Thanks for reading!