Embroidery

If you are a business owner, you know there are some good days, not so good days, what was I thinking days, I just want to be a stay-at-home mom days, I love my job days, wow I really did this days, and lots of really really crazy days. Well, these last few days have been a little bit of all of those.

Yesterday, we were packing up our order for Nordstrom when Mark caught a very small error that is actually a gigantic error. The factory switched around our UPC labels and printed the tags incorrectly. Sounds like it wouldn't be a huge deal, but Nordstrom has very strict ship-by dates and Friday is ours. As you would imagine, it is a little tough to have our factory print labels and send them overnight international to arrive in time to receive, attach to the RuffleButts and pack up the entire shipment. So, I spent the morning figuring out how to deal with it. There was a solution, but now I just have to count on a tag supplier and UPS to do their jobs correctly and on-time to allow us to meet our deadline. A year ago, I would have been having a stress overload, but now I just take it as it comes. Don't get me wrong, it wears me down and burns me out at times, but I have learned that almost everything has a solution.

Today, has been the total opposite, a nice relaxing day. Our new hats arrived, finally, and we now have almost no hats on backorder!! I also sucked it up and invested in our own commercial embroidery machine. This was one I put off for the the past few years for multiple reasons, the first being the large investment, but more importantly the time to run it. It is a nice feeling knowing that it is now in my control and I can run our embroidery in the time and quality standards that I like to offer to our customers. It is days like these that I feel the hard work pays off...still stressful, still busy, but I feel like we are moving forward, and that's the direction I like to go =)

If you are a fellow business owner and you are in one of the not so relaxing days, just know that it comes with the territory, and there is an end in sight. Okay, well it's not really an end, but at least a breather in sight. Tomorrow, I'm sure it'll be back to the roller coaster for me, but for today, I am going to go take a little mommy time now and will catch up later tonight.