Moebius... Entrelac... Toll Road!! Moebius... Entrelac... Market!!

One thing you can say for running a knitting shop, you will never lack for variety!! Over the past month, I've designed two new patterns for classes, accepted an invite to run a stall at the Luna Night Market and received a letter from the government telling me that my home is going to be demolished as part of the East-West link... admittedly, that last is not directly related to the shop, but it is another interesting challenge that I'm going to have to fit in around the winter rush.

Cowl-Leidoscope
(c) Andrea Tappe

This is the Cowl-leidoscope, the project for the Moebius Cast Ons class. We've run the Moebius class once already (first Sunday afternoon in July) and we'll be running it again on the first Sunday afternoon in September. The class covers five ways to create a Moebius scarf or shawl: participants can knit the Cowl-leidoscope as part of the session.

In alternate months (August and October), we'll be running an introduction to entrelac - sadly, the demo is not at a stage where it's ready to photograph. (That's another way of saying I've only just started casting it on this afternoon!). Expect to see a pic of the Tweedy Garterlac Scarf soon on our FB page!

When it's finished, it will look vaguely like the photo below- except it will be striped in a finer tweed yarn and done in squares, not rectangles... so only very vaguely like!!

What entrelac looks like

The Luna Night Market has been our next challenge - for four Wednesday Nights in August, we will be at Stall G21 in J Shed with our brand new Giant Yarn Crate from 5pm to 10pm. This is going to make Wednesday a pretty long day, since I usually start at 5:30am with a circuit at the local gym... But I'm sure I can survive for one month!

The goal with the market is to have a good range of projects, with things to tempt impulse purchasers while also making sure that people know that we have the wherewithal to help them knit, crochet or tricot a full garment. The last weekend in July will probably be dedicated to making up Spiderweb Scarf packs with our stock of Rare Comfort Kid Mohair, putting together a Pom-Pom and French Knitter kit for the kids and maybe whipping up a kit for the Rare Yarns Lace Gauntlets or a Misti Alpaca two-yarn scarf... I have to think very hard about this, since there's only so much I can fit in the crate! Apparently anything over 300kgs and it's likely to collapse ;)

Spiderweb Scarf

To market, to market...

The birthday cape - about half finished

And finally... the toll road. Not much to say there, except to hope that I'm going to get a friend's birthday present finished much faster than I expected, since I'm crocheting on the way to and from the protests - and sometimes crocheting during them as well. I figure if Madame Defarge could knit in the shadow of the guillotine, the least I can do is crochet woolly capes as I wait for the bulldozers to show up!

The cape is a nifty little thing that my friend picked off the Garnstudio website - I didn't have a colour in Twilleys 100% chunky wool that she liked, but I've substituted one of the New Zealand Naturally yarns, which is working extremely well. It's one of those patterns where you have to have faith - I crocheted the first couple of rows and was convinced that the pattern and/or the substitution was a dud - it looked terrible!! However, over time, the pattern started to emerge and the cape started to look more like the photograph... a good analogy for the situation with the toll road - it has started out looking pretty awful, but hopefully it will improve over time!!

Follow me!

... Or, on starting a small business, part II.

In one of my posts last year, I talked about starting up a small business. In that post, I mentioned marketing. As I've just finished the 2009 marketing plan, I thought this week would be a good time to talk about marketing in a bit more depth. I also thought it might be a good time to ask you for a favour!

First point - marketing a small business. In my little wool-selling world, marketing is about telling as many knitters, crocheters and other yarn-users about the shop as I possibly can. It is also about doing this within a fairly restricted budget!

At the start of every year, I sit down and write out a marketing calendar. The marketing calendar shows our promotional activities for each month and a rough budget. So I need to work out how much I'm prepared to spend and where I need to spend it to reach as many wool purchasers as possible. An example marketing calendar entry is below:

March
- Run 20 ads on RRR ($1000)
- Put ads on Ravelry ($20)
- Promote classes in local papers and on Knitterati (free).

As we move through the year, I review the marketing calendar and either do the activities I've planned or alter them to fit in with anything else that might be happening. For example, if a supplier is doing a promotion in March, I might need to add some activities to support that promotion or postpone something that would undermine it. When planning promotional activities, free is good! Cheap is nearly as good and paid is a last resort.

For that reason, CCCK runs a lot of online ads and makes heavy use of free community event listings. Online advertising is relatively cheap - a single, small print ad costs several hundred dollars, whereas a Google link costs a few cents per click.

Cheap ads aren't much help though if you are not reaching the right people. A recent trial run on Facebook was a good example of this - my ads were seen by lots of people and a good percentage clicked through to our webpage - but none of them (as far as I know!) actually came in to buy wool. Basically, I spent a heap of money annoying people. So I've reviewed my marketing calendar and taken out any future Facebook campaigns.

This process of testing ads and promotions, reviewing the results and ditching things that don't work is 90% of small business marketing. The remaining 10% involves seeking help - reading business magazines, marketing blogs and competitors' ads, and getting advice (again, at the best possible price!) from experts in various marketing strategies. I realise that most small businesses don't have much budget to spend on consultants - but if you can find some cash, it is worth considering. Too often, small business owners try to be completely self-sufficient - and they end up missing out because they aren't aware that something is possible. Google AdWords is a good example - I spent some money getting help from an SEO company recently. Without that help, I'd have probably spent too much for my AdWords and wouldn't have tracked the campaign effectively. I reckon I've more than saved the cost of the consultation in avoiding the grief and the costs of a dud campaign.

On the topic of seeking help - I mentioned that I needed a favour. You are currently reading our blog, which is one of our free advertising strategies! Google and Blogger both rank blogs and present them in search results - one of the things that they rank blogs on is the number of followers. The idea is that if a blog has lots of followers, it must be a good blog.

I hope that this qualifies as a good blog and I'd like to see it coming up in search results and on the Blogs of Note page in Blogger. To do this, I need to round up about 100 followers - which is the favour. Will you please follow my blog and help me to rank higher?

It's very easy to follow my blog - just click Follow This Blog (on the right side of the screen, under the subscription area). Provide your gmail address and you're done! *Unfortunately, it seems you have to have a gmail address to follow Blogger blogs - something to do with Google owning Blogger...

So there we go! Marketing 101 for Small Businesses. Now that's out of the way, I must get back to my stash-workout (I'm almost through the left front of Fi's vest - hoping to have pics up on Ravelry and on the blog before too much longer...)

Sales and stashes

One of the most exciting parts of being a shop owner is having sales! We had one last month, and (this will show you what a sad life I have!) I really enjoyed it. There's something about watching happy customers leaving the shop with their bargains that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy - it's a sort of shopping-by-proxy, where I can experience all the joy of shopping without the horror of working out how to pay off my credit card afterwards :-)

My past life as a tech writer didn't really prepare me for organising and running sales. Negotiating contracts yes, but selling off 40kg of stock at a reduced rate, no. Now my life has acquired a new and wonderful dimension - the Marketing (Sales) calendar.

The calendar works thus: in order to attract traffic to the store during the quieter periods of the year (i.e. summer, when no-one in Australia knits or crochets because the temperature regularly exceeds 40 degrees), I need to hold at least one sale. I also need to ensure that I don't go broke by selling off too much stock at low prices. A third point - I need to try to run my sales so that they don't clash with other sales held by other stores - ideally, my sale will come first, so that everyone's stash will be full and they won't be tempted by other wool stores. Failing that, my sale needs to happen when everyone else is selling at full price so that people who have been tempted by other wool stores will still be tempted to buy at my sale.

In case that wasn't complex enough, our suppliers have sales. We can use those sales to get cheap stock for our customers and make them happy - but we need to make sure that we're doing this at a time that doesn't undermine our own sales. The last thing we want is to get known as Our Ladies of the Perpetual Discount Bargain!

All these factors come together in the Marketing (Sales) Calendar in a piece of organisation that could most accurately be represented in an equation developed by a quantum physicist. Actually, at present, my Calendar could more accurately be described as a 'conceptual document'. What that means is, being so new to the business, I am making a lot of stuff up as I go along! Next year, I might write something down - and the year after that, I'll go looking for a quantum physicist who can sum up the whole thing for me in a neat little equation...

On starting a business...

Recently on Ravelry (the all-time-best, most amazing knitting and crochet website in existence!), a member posted a question. She wanted to open a local yarn shop (an LYS in knitter-speak) and was looking for some advice. Since Ravelry is an international forum, I'm not sure how much help my advice was, but I gave it anyway - and then I thought, as a dedicated tree-hugger, I should recycle that post for this week's blog entries. I was further motivated to do this when two people asked me for advice on running a small business - it's an Omen! I thought, so I started writing.

Before I get too far, I should offer a disclaimer: I'm an Aussie, so most of the stuff in this post is useless to those of you who are not based down under. Also, even though I'm doing my best to comply with the laws in force in Australia, the state of Victoria and the City of Darebin respectively, I may not always have gotten it right - so even if you ARE an Aussie, don't rely on anything I've said here. It might be wrong and I would hate for you make your money back by suing me!!

The very first thing an aspiring business owner should do is go without sleep for four days. If you can't manage that, you won't last long in your own business.

OK, bad joke. The point of the bad joke is, anyone who starts a business expecting to start at 11:00, leave at 3:00 and spend their weekends partying is going to be sadly disappointed. Eventually, if you're smart and lucky, your business will run on its own and you can do all that stuff. Usually, however, there is a period of time where, no matter how smart or lucky you are, you need to do the hard yards. The hard yards for me has involved working seven day weeks from 8:00am until midnight when required. It's also involved some extremely quiet periods where I worked a standard 40-hour week, but got no money for it, because I had no clients - the entire 40 hours was spent advertising and networking to find customers!

Related to point 1 above: really love what you do. If you don't, then why would you work such stupid hours? You may or may not make the money to justify it - so you may as well make sure that it will be worthwhile anyway, because you'll be having so much fun, the cash is secondary.

Point 2: practical stuff. Aussies should visit http://www.business.gov.au/. On this site, you will find several useful things:

• How-to guides for people who are starting or closing a business. They are written in governmentese, but, with patience, you'll be able to get some useful info out of them.
• Copies of every form you might conceivably need to start a business.
• An online form to register for an ABN.

Use this information to work out what type of entity you want your business to be:

• It is really easy to set up as a sole trader - all you need is an ABN in your own name - but you then take on all the risk of your business. That is, you personally get sued if anything goes wrong and you personally are liable for all the debts of your business. Think very hard about how much you want to keep your house, car and family before you decide on this route!
• You could trade as a partnership with a close friend or spouse. This is the same as being a sole trader, except there are now two of you to sue! Speaking from experience and observation, make very, very sure that your values and attitudes are similar enough to your partner's to make the arrangement workable. If you disagree on fundamental things such as how to manage a customer relationship, your partnership will go sideways faster that you could imagine. On the other hand, if you both agree on everything, one of you is redundant (except as a diversion for unpaid creditors!). You need to be able to get value with both parties bringing different strengths and knowledge to the partnership to make it worthwhile taking this option.
• You can trade as a company. There are significant running costs, but the company, as a fictitious person, can take the rap for you if someone decides to sue you or your business goes under. You keep your home and the family stays on speaking terms. I decided this was the option for me.

Once you've worked out what type of business you want to be, do a business plan. Make it a really thorough one, including the following sections:

• Your unique selling proposition. If you don't have something that sets you apart from the competition, there's no real point going into business in the first place (unless you want to buy a franchise, which is perfectly valid too!)
• Your vision for the business. Break this section down into what you'll need to make that vision a reality, for example what sort of premises you'll need, furniture and fittings, equipment, stock, staff - everything, right down to the feng shui goldfish (if required)
• A marketing plan. I suggest start with the amount of cash you have on hand and work backwards from there to develop simple and affordable marketing strategies. A 30 second TV ad might be a great way to reach your target market, but it won't work out if your total budget for the year is $2000. Work out how to get maximum contact with your target market for the money you have - my personal preference is to look into things like AdWords, advertising on websites that my target market visits, advertising in specialist publications that they read and similar strategies before I look at mass media, but that's to do with the businesses I have.
• A budget. The easiest way to do this is to add up the cost of everything you need to make your vision a reality. If you have the cash to cover this, then you have your budget. If you don't, then look at which parts of your vision you can hold over until some more cash shows up. Make sure you have enough cash on hand to carry the business for 12 months, even if you don't sell anything at all - this is probably pessimistic, but I like to know that I've got all my bases covered.

Once you've done this, set about making your vision a reality. This is easy now, because you have a written statement of everything that you need to achieve it - so all you need to do is go through and check everything off as you find it (shop in a high-traffic retail strip, done; white Swedish look tables and chairs, done; stock, done; etc).

As you go about making your vision reality, start the ball rolling on your marketing plan. You don't want to open your business without people knowing that you're there! A new business opening is a major event and it's usually pretty easy to get some buzz going - it's a bit harder to get people excited with a spiel like "Well, we've been here about six weeks now, so we're still kinda new, but only like compared to other businesses that have been here eight years...".

Last point: once you've opened your doors, track everything that happens against your business plan. The sooner you catch a variation from what you expect, the sooner you can fix things! And the sooner you fix things, the less likely they are to bring your business unstuck.

Here endeth the lesson...

Food, glorious food!

I don't think I've ever explained the origins of our name in this blog, so I probably should correct that omission now before I share this week's story.

Our name is an acronym made up from the products and services that we offer. (Why an acronym? The blog post on registering trading names in Victoria, Australia is coming...). We sell Coffee, Cake, Crochet and Knitting - CCCK! (Actually, we sell wool, yarn, cotton, tea, coffee, biscuits, knitting needles, crochet hooks, buttons and other stuff, but WYCTCBKNCH & OS wasn't particularly catchy or memorable. Looked like I'd been beating my head against the keyboard - which, after three hours of dealing with the Dept of Justice, was a distinct possibility!).

Anyway - coffee, cake, crochet, knits. CCCK. Great name for a shop. Opened the shop. Got the wool and accessories for the crochet and knits part. For my next trick, I had to organise food and beverages for the coffee and cake part.

Do I need to tell you that this is where it all went slightly sideways? In case none of you have ever dealt with a local council or run a business, this is where it all went slightly sideways.

Before you can serve food and beverages in Australia, you need to convince the state and local governments that you will not kill or maim anyone by doing so. This is a very good thing, because without proper regulation, we'd all be in strife, but it seemed to me that the whole process was a mite complex for what I was trying to achieve.

*I rang the council for information. Yep, no worries, it would be posted to me straight away.

A week later, I rang the council for information. Yep, no worries, it would be posted to me straight away.

A week later, I rang the council for information. Yep, no worries, it would be posted to me straight away. (Rep from * four times.)

Six weeks after I opened, I got the promised information. The first thing I noticed was that it was extremely comprehensive. The next thing I noticed was that all the kitchens in the example photos were very new and shiny... For those non-Melbournians reading this blog, most of Northcote was built in the 1800s. The houses and shops are old and full of character. The kitchen here looks like it was added on to the building in the 1940s or 1950s. It is old and full of character, but the floor is plywood (nailed to what looks like the remains of the original back verandah) - the cupboards are painted ply - there are no tiled surfaces and the louvre windows, although barred to prevent thieves, do little or nothing to prevent dust. It is not easy to clean. It does not meet modern sanitation standards. When I offered to cook my bloke a meal one night, he reacted as if I'd pulled a gun on him ("You cook in there?") and he spent the evening carefully checking his meal for signs of life when he thought I wasn't looking. In short, if I was going to serve food, it looked like the kitchen was going to be a problem.

I filled out my food safety template on the Victorian government website and submitted it, together with a hand-drawn plan of my shop and a cheque for the application fee. Here's where I have to say that the Darebin Council did a sterling job - I got a call within two weeks of submitting the application and had a food safety inspector at the shop a week later.

I showed him the kitchen.

He assured me that he'd seen much worse and regaled me with anecdotes about shops where he'd found dead rodents in pies, cockroaches in bread and other things too horrible to contemplate. Needless to say, I wasn't that reassured to find out that I was only one tiny step away from slumhood!!

The food safety inspector carefully explained each of the problems with the current kitchen. The floor needed to have a tiled or linoleum surface with coving up the walls so that it could be cleaned properly. I needed a double-bowl sink to wash and sanitise dishes. I needed tiles or stainless steel on the wall behind the sink so that I could clean it properly.

I nearly forgot to add - at no point was I actually planning to prepare food from scratch. As a cook, I make an awesome knitter. The plan was always to buy in cakes, bikkies and snacks from a commercial bakery, with plunger tea and coffee. The revamp of the floor, the new sink and the tiles had to happen so that I could wash dishes in my kitchen without creating a public health hazard.

A final word of praise for the council: I explained that the kitchen looked as it did because (judging from available evidence) my landlord is a tight bastard who won't pay out for renovations. I further explained that, having sunk most of my available cash into stock, I didn't have enough money to renovate the kitchen myself. So we worked out a compromise.

I now have permission to serve tea, coffee and individually wrapped biscuits. The tea and coffee must be instant and made out the front using an electric kettle (because I'd have to wash a plunger). I need to sanitise the kettle regularly, but can do that safely in the shop. The tea and coffee must be served in disposable cups with disposable spoons (because I can't wash cups in the current kitchen). I can serve prewrapped food and if someone gets food poisoning from it, that's the manufacturer's problem.

Believe it or not, I consider this to be a happy ending. The food safety inspector was very reasonable and made every effort to work out a solution that was safe and met legal requirements, but that didn't wipe my business out by requiring expensive renovations. I spent yesterday ringing around to find eco-disposable crockery, decent instant coffee and tasty biscuits. Hopefully before next week's post, we will be living up to our name, serving tea, coffee and tasty snacks to happy knitters, crocheters and crafty folks!

Mystery shopping

About two years ago, when I was tech writing full-time (as opposed to tech writing full-time and running a wool shop!), I pitched to a mystery shopping company. The pitch went something like: sometimes your mystery shopping team find businesses that don't provide such great service. At present, you tell the company what they are doing badly, but you don't tell them how to fix it. How would you like to give them the option to hire me to write a fantastic sales manual to ensure that the problems you've identified never come up again?


I thought it was a pretty good pitch, but it never really took off. Possibly it wasn't a bright idea to target clients who were already sinking most of their disposable income into retaining a mystery shopping service. Anyway, for whatever reason, not much came of it, and I never thought of mystery shopping again - until I discovered yesterday that mystery shopping is completely unnecessary!!


Let me explain what happened. The other day, I received a customer complaint. I was really happy, and I put 250 loyalty points on the customer's card straight away.


Now hang on a moment (I hear you say)!! You received a complaint and you were happy? And you rewarded the customer?


To which the answer is, you bet I did!! Big companies who have no relationship with their customers have to spend a fortune hiring mystery shoppers to find out whether or not their staff are up to scratch. I hope that CCCK customers always trust us enough to tell us when things don't work out quite how they expect. I know it sounds cheesy, but I genuinely believe that we need to know when things aren't working so that we can fix them.

After all, I've never solved a problem that I didn't know existed. And besides, I can't afford to retain a mystery shopping service...

High Vibes/Planet of the 8th...

Yesterday, for the very first time in my life, I worked in a shop during a street festival. The Northcote High St Festival happens every September, the weekend before the Grand Final. Not being a big fan of large, alcohol-driven crowds, I've usually stayed away. But this year, the festival took on a whole new dimension - each slightly woozy punter was a potential convert to the Dark Side, an aspiring knitter or crocheter who could be wooed into an extravagant luxury yarn purchase, rather than someone who might accidentally vomit on me if I got too close.

To celebrate the festival, we ran free knitting and crochet classes all day. As a promotion, it worked reasonably well - we had a steady flow of people through the shop pretty much all day. It might have worked better if our offer had appeared on the festival program, the festival website or our own website (still under construction!), but the response was still pretty good. One thing that helped immensely was having one of the free classes outside - I think we have Ewelina to thank for that idea! We hauled a couch and two chairs out the front of the shop, sat our instructors down and got them knitting. One of our raving fans also showed up and joined them - like magic, people started coming into the shop to find out more. Note for next year: get a marquee and set up a proper outdoor lesson area. It should go off like a frog in a sock.

The festival was also a great opportunity to showcase new stuff - like Inge's amazing scarves (she does classes - see our website! - and she's on Etsy) and Chiara's gorgeous handspun yarns (she also does classes and has an Etsy site - check 'em out!). I'm not sure what new stuff we'll have next year, but I'm surely going to make sure that we have plenty of it prominently displayed on festival day!

The main point of the festival is music. Note for next year: find a band or buskers and set them up inside or under the marquee. The gallery across the road had, throughout the day, drummers - a band - at least one DJ - and massive, massive crowds. About 10pm, I looked out the front window, the place was still packed. Fantastic PR, although they may be feeling a little weary this morning!

The other main points of the festival are food and alcohol. Late in the afternoon, a person wandered in and asked us if we had a courtyard. I replied cautiously that we did sort of, but it was more like a car space. All became clear when the person then asked "Is this the Peacock Hotel?" I explained that it wasn't and carefully guided them to the street. You can see the Peacock Hotel from my front door, but I'd say the odds are only 50/50 that the person made it. Note for next year: develop a procedure for managing people who are not operating at their usual level of competence.

My final festival note to myself for next year is - get some of my friends over and make sure I arrange some time out! It sounded like there was some great stuff going on, and I was a bit sorry that I didn't make some time to explore and see what else was going on. That said, by the end of the day, I was pretty happy to curl up on the couch with my knitting and listen to the gentle sounds of techno pumping out of the gallery across the way - much easier and more comfortable than trying to actually squeeze into one of the venues!!

Deliveries, classes and a workplace injury...

This morning started, as my mornings now tend to do, with a delivery. This delivery was five sets of shelves (for stock) and a butcher's block (for when I finally get council approval to serve tea, coffee and snacks). The next visitor for the day was the Birch Haberdashery delivery man with a truckload of big needles and crochet hooks.

Deliveries are a major part of setting up a shop, it seems. The opening inventory order arrives and totally fills your shop with cartons and packing. Once you unpack it, the empty cartons fill your lounge room and cause your visitors to worry about your sanity. The unpacked stock, though, barely fills a single bookcase. Every time a customer comes in, you find yourself explaining that more stock is in transit and that you will order in anything they want that is not available. Sometimes you also explain this to neighbours, friends and relatives who stop by to see how you're doing. When you start running really short on stock, you explain it to cats and lamp-posts...

You will also receive deliveries of shop fittings - which is where the workplace injury comes in! In the immortal words of the sages: "Grasshopper, the shop assistant has put 17m of packing tape around that shelf for a REASON. So take it easy with the scissors, yes?". There may also have been an immortal sage who staggered around a shop with blood dripping from their nose after a shelf had fallen on it, alternately invoking Divine Assistance and describing the act of love - but probably not.

Number one retail tip: if you have bruises and cuts on your face, it is much harder to develop a good rapport with your customers. At least it stops me blathering on about stock - I am more concerned with explaining that the Womens' Refuge is actually up the road and around the corner... no - this is nothing, just had a shelf fall on me, looks much worse than it is thanks... I think about suing myself for millions and retiring, but suspect that this has been done before.

By midday, the bruise is going down nicely and the cut is almost invisible under a thick coat of concealer. Now it's time to turn my attention to our class schedule once again! Classes are a big part of what we offer - most of the point of the shop is to develop a community and to spread the word about knitting.

The Birch delivery is related to our first effort in that regard - free knitting classes on 21/9 for the High Vibes Street Festival. I sincerely hope that at least some of the 70,000+ people who come through on the day want to learn to knit and crochet, as I've got two cartons of needles lined up, ready to go. I also have some lovely ribbon - but no wool as yet. That will no doubt be tomorrow's delivery...

Yesterday, I finished working through a course schedule with our first instructor, a local spinner, dyer and artist. She is happy to teach a beginner crochet class for two hours on Wednesday nights - exciting!! October's project is a hat and scarf - November's project is Xmas decorations.

Our second instructor showed up on the weekend to talk about doing some classes - she wasn't sure what she had to offer or what we wanted. As a sample, she produced a jumper with a replica of part of the Bayeaux tapestry on it. I immediately begged her on bended knee to run cable and intarsia/fair isle classes a.s.a.p.!! She is working on it and says she'll get back to me. I am crossing my fingers, as it would be lovely to have something for advanced knitters as well as beginners.

Better go - got a delivery guy at the door and an ice pack to replenish!