So a night that I should've been celebrating, I felt defeated.
And here's why.
I am a people pleaser by nature. I've been that way for my entire life. I've gotten sooooo much better at it over the years (mostly since meeting Blake and being in the Army), but I'm still a pleaser by nature.
And it's not because I want to necessarily make everyone happy and make everyone love me. Quite honestly it's just cause when I care about something or someone, I care about them hard. I am so passionate about the things I love, and when they hurt, I hurt. When they worry, I worry. When they're disappointed, I'm disappointed. So I'm overly passionate about this community because I truly LOVE you all. I want to serve you, because you allow me to pursue my passion.
I wrote a blog post when I first started the blog called "Redefining profit" and the main theme was that I didn't care how much money we made. My promise was to always pursue the people.
you.
So when all of the messages started pouring in of disappointment for selling out too fast, I felt like I let an entire community down. I felt so painfully defeated. The anxiety that I deal with daily started pouring in the floodgates and I was sinking. fast.
I started questioning how I could've done everything better instead of being down right grateful for 520 orders.
but joy comes in the morning.
And I woke up this morning feeling revived. Blake and I had a "business meeting" hahah! for about two hours and I placed another huge order of shirts to get us through fall.
i'm swimming again.
So here's the deal.
I don't think we're gonna change much about our business model. For now. I know that for this season that we're in - it's what's right for our family. I can't risk it for them.
Our shop was founded to inspire you to celebrate holidays and create family traditions with those you love most.
Our tees were created to inspire you to ACT. To get out and make memories with your loved ones.
Because each of our tees has a distinct purpose and correlates with a specific event or holiday, we release them in limited quantities because they are unique to a certain time of the year.
We did this to limit the amount of dead stock we would maintain. Our goal was to sell through 75% of our inventory every month so we wouldn't have to maintain a lot of stock on our shelves as we move to the next holiday. In doing this, it allows us to continuously bring you new trendy and hip designs for every season and occasion! So if you don't snag one one launch, you can hopefully get one at another.
Being that we are a Military family, this is CRITICAL for us. We cannot maintain a lot of stock because we are constantly moving. It's just not smart for us.
Additionally, we are a live debt free kinda family. Both in and out of the business. We pay for everything on our credit cards and ensure we are able to pay it off every month to build up our credit while maintaining no debt. Every month, we then put 40-50% of our paycheck into savings or investments. We've implemented these same principles into our business and are doing everything we can to remain debt free. In doing this, we are only using the money made from previous launches to reinvest into the company to fund future launches + more!
So the better our sales do, the more we can bring you in the future.
Because our shirts are made custom for our shop from scratch right here in the USA, our turnaround time is very long. From the moment I pay for an order, it takes 4-6 weeks to have the fabric cut, sewn, dyed, screen printed and sent back to me to send to you! I am extremely involved in the process and keep an eye on the timeline throughout it all to try and get the shirts as quickly as possible, but I also know that it's because we are getting the BEST quality organic cotton shirts and so every minute and day that we wait is worth it because of the quality.
However, with this timeline, that also means we have to "front" the costs of all tees. Even if we do a pre-order, we are paying for the tees up front because of the timeline. This is specifically why our pre-orders also have "limited stock". We will continue working to announce and release pre-orders sooner so that customers are actually able to front the costs for their own tees, but that will all be a work in progress. The end goal will be to have unlimited pre-order stocks.
So... for now we will continue releasing limited quantities at each launch and based on the response and time available we will do a "pre-order" sale shortly following the launch.
