SELF IMPROVEMENT

I've been at this jewelry line for about nine months now. If it were a human, I'd be giving birth soon. It's taken much longer than I expected to launch it, but everyday I try to get something, anything(!) accomplished. Some days it's been as small as calculating prices for all my pieces or figuring out how to make the links on my website not underlined, which was actually much harder than I thought. Turns out it required 4 hours of being on the phone with the website-maker software company, talking to an annoying man that was hitting on me over the phone, while talking to me in some weird computer language that he was surprised I didn't understand. On other days its a bigger accomplishment, like figuring out the perfect lighting and set up to take all the pictures of the jewelry. Sometimes I've felt like I lost the very essence of what I began working on, because being on the phone with the bank and credit card companies for two days setting up a secure socket layer to make sure credit cards are encrypted en route to me and complying with all of the government regulations associated with charging credit cards has nothing to do with pretty, shiny, make-you-feel-good, sparkly jewelry.

I've been trying to not only understand, but utilize this social networking/media thing that's going on with marketing and trying to network with it. I've been working on relationships with store owners downtown, so that they will fall in love with me and my jewelry and sell lots and lots of it in their stores. For someone that would much rather live an hour outside of town than be around people everyday, this is a very difficult thing to do. "Hello Mrs. Store Owner, I have a fabulous jewelry line coming out soon, wouldn't you love to carry it in your store?"

Right.

So after months and months of chipping away at the ol' business block, I've made some good relationships. I've scheduled a couple jewelry parties with friends and a couple trunk shows with stores. If you ask me how I did it, I honestly don't think I could tell you, but I do know that if I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, that's what seems to have been working so far.

Now if only I could figure out how to have perfect hair while driving my convertible down the street...