Category Archives: Commerce

Work that turns into Work

Today – and last week – I had two days where I really understood why out-sourcing can be a really good thing.

Gigi and I sell real tangible good – tie-dye 2.0, also called mudmee tie-dye. Gigi is the part of our enterprise who creates the products and also takes them out to art and craft show. I just sit in the house and stretch out my feelers to potential customers through the internet.

For me, building the site and programming the whole inventory and order handling was the self-assigned  internship to learn dealing with the web. I also learned a lot about marketing which I did not have to do much of when I was dealing with very few clients in the high-tech and scientific programming, which I had done before venturing out into the new realm on the web.

These last two weekends we had added two new types of shirts that had already created good responses at shows and now our mailing list also responded very well. So, after the waves calmed down a bit, I was working till late into the night to process all those orders.

Initially each and every order was met (by me) with big excitement and a quick trip to the paypal backed to print the shipping label and get those items out. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when there are so many orders that it takes me all night to get the ready for shipping – but I also understand why out-sourcing can be a real good thing.

But before  I can even consider this I would probably have to ‘blackbox’ my system some more. As it was all hand crafted there are still a some elements in my system that are obvious to me – because I built them – but not black-boxy enough, so that I  can just hire somebody and let him or her do the order processing.

In case you are a bit curious what this is all about – I am speaking about Mudmee Tie-dye at  Thaidye.