What Happened to Black Friday?

   You may have noticed that I failed to blog yesterday.   There are a couple of fairly good reasons for this.    First….I guess I forgot that 24 hours comes and goes so quickly during the holidays.   Second…we were a little busy making stockings.   This is actually bitter sweet because we enjoy the sales…like the money…..even like the work…however!   Our customers make us work far more than we should have to.  

 

Case in point:   With a little research and statistics from previous years, we stock-piled up a few designs that we were sure were going to be the “main sellers”. Every Christmas,  Rudolph and fox stockings are popular.   Red and green are popular Christmas colors as well.   If you have to invest in designs and colors for your “pre-made” stockings…these guys are the ones.   So.   With several years of sales at our fingertips,   we created a fair number of these stockings ( along with some others)  so that the Christmas rush will not be so hectic.   I knew it was going to be a little more challenging now that I have the embroidery machine and have never tried it out on this large of a scale.   I thought we were at the very least, prepared slightly so we would not have any long crazy days.( By the way :   We sold 38 today, and 26 yesterday…..And there are currently 39 more orders with even more processing!)

Enter the customer!     No,  not the previous customers that made those statistics that we were counting on.   Oh no!  These customers put the “custom” in customers.   They all want something different..   Something NOT on the menu.  Not in the store.   Something NOT prepared in advance.

Cheryl made the observation that the items we have ready in the closet are actually being selected AGAINST!    Why is this?   Is there an eye in the closet making sure that those are not the stockings sold?   Is the universe making us look bad or just messing with out minds?

Probably the later.   I mean,   we ARE still making the stockings and they are getting out.   But I feel like we have wasted all that time and money trying to prepare for a good year.  And it makes us look bad because we seem “unprepared”  when we actually were!   Cheryl thinks we should just avoid thinking about stockings altogether until October next year.  I am beginning to see the wisdom in this thinking.

 

So.  After all that complaining….I still want to say that I’m happy to be finally making sales at this level.   And I’m sure that the jury is still out as we get closer to Christmas as to how the closet stockings will sell.   Everyone still wants their custom pets I guess.   Perhaps we traded one customer that bought for families and traded them for the customer that buys for their pets.  We were HOPING for BOTH.   What better way to double our sales!

So it is currently 9PM and Cheryl is still wrapping up the remaining orders up for the day….and that is when it happened….I realized it is Saturday!  Where did Friday go?   I mentioned I could time travel….Well occasionally I leap forward.   Which is slightly better than leaping back in time in that I can actually remember more from future jumps.  It’s a bit complicated to explain.   I seriously have to write that blog posting about my time travels.  But I digress…..

I’m sure in a couple of hours,  after cutting some felt and ironing some blank stockings,   I will wonder where Saturday went and will not believe it is Sunday already.   We shall see how things go.   And I should probably end this post as I’m probably in the wrong “mood” to be writing.   I’m somewhere between giddy and sore and exhausted.   

I leave you with some of the creative names that people are putting on the stockings.   I can only imagine they are pet names or else these kids are going to be scarred for life