Missed connections

Our wedding photographer (Craig Mitchelldyer) is on Facebook and I've been following him for some time now. His posts are often non-work-related because he's just a normal guy. However, he linked to an article today from another wedding photographer that puts a little more perspective on what it means to be such an intimate part of someones life, but only for such a small part of it.

The article, Remains of the Day in the Washingtonian was written by photographer Matt Mendelsohn.

After reading the article, and as a member of the wedding vendor community, I must say that his feelings are dead-on. We often find ourselves wondering what our customers are up to after the big day. We have a sense of connection, but it almost always gets lost on the day of the wedding (or the day we ship the product).

We rarely hear how the wedding actually went, or what the guests thought of the menus, table numbers, etc. at the reception. We often have brides telling us that they'll send us pictures of the event, but rarely receive them.

There really is almost a sense of lost friendship once it's all said and done. We've built a bond with these people, become a part of their day, and then it's done. Just like that. A flash in the pan, and we usually don't even get to see that much.

So here is the full comment that I left on Craig's Facebook wall in response to the article. I didn't realize how much I was going to write until I started...


Amazing article Craig. Thanks so much for sharing.

When you met us and shot our wedding back in November of '08, I was working in IT, and my wife Amanda wasn't working. We didn't have a ton of money to spend on the wedding and received a lot of financial help from her parents. Her mom (a self-trained graphic designer) helped us design our invitations and we printed and cut them ourselves.

She had been doing this for a few months prior to us needing them as a hobby/business on Etsy. She continued to do this throughout the time leading up to our wedding as a way to help finance the event. It eventually grew into a full-time business for her.

Fast forward a year and a half after our wedding, and our son Jameson was born. Four months later, my mother-in-law is burnt out / bored with the wedding stationery business that she's created.

At the same time, Amanda and I are desperately searching for a way for me to quit my job and stay home with our son. So we talked with my mother-in-law, and decided to try taking over the business so that I could stay home, and she could move on to something that was more interesting for her.

Now two and a half years later, Amanda runs the stationery business, and I am a full-time stay at home dad!

We often have some of the same thoughts about our customers as what Matt expressed in this article. We feel as though we are so much a part of their lives right up to the wedding, and then nothing... They're off of our radar and we rarely hear any more about them.

Of course a few of them return to order other products in the future, or they refer a friend, and we get to hear a glimpse of their story from the friend's perspective. But that's it.

Amanda has made some friends that she keeps in contact with here on Facebook, but beyond that we truly have no idea what has happened to the fairy tale that we helped produce.

We are working on putting together a wedding map on our website to help showcase some of the products that we've sold, and where in the world they've ended up. We hope to be able to include some small tidbits of the story of each couple as well, but so much of that will have to come from them. It just seems like it would make the whole thing more real, more personal, more interesting. I hope that our customers will feel the same way and help us to build a living map of the stories that we've been a part of.

Amanda and I certainly cherish the memories that you helped us capture on our wedding day. We still go back to the Edgefield as often as possible, and walk around the grounds. We stop on the hill behind the Winery Wing and look at the water tower. We walk through the vineyard and always take our own pictures in the same place that you took some for us (including the one you used for the DVD label). We hang out on the balconies and remember the first kiss.

We remember the rainbow that happened just before she walked down the aisle. I couldn't see it from where I was out in front of Blackberry Hall, but she could from the back door where she was waiting to make her entrance. You were inside waiting for her to come in, so you weren't able to get a shot of it, but it is still one of our favorite memories.

All in all, the memories that photographers help their clients capture are often the ones that get remembered the best, because there is always physical proof to remind us. The memories that don't get captured, the ones that live only in our minds, and the lives that continue to create more memories are the true reason for the day.

But without the memories that do get captured by the photographers, those moments can only live on as long as someone remembers them well enough to tell someone else. Photographs can help so much with keeping those memories alive. And Matt is right, it's not all about the little details of the wedding day. Those are all just for show. The details that truly matter are those that happen after the cameras leave, the fairy tale is over, and life goes back to being normal (whatever that is).

We have a new office!

Well, our office project is nearly complete. We still have a little bit of finish work to do and a heat pump to be installed, but Amanda is now doing all of her work in the new office.

The building started out looking like this:

And now it looks like this:

You can see all of our progress pictures here: The New Office

I haven't kept up on the blog, because we've been focusing everything on getting this done. It's been a huge learning experience for me. Amanda says she'll never ask for another project like this again. And I'm pretty sure my father-in-law wishes he hadn't retired! :-)

Overall though, this has been an awesome summer and all of the hard work has finally paid off. I'm hoping that, with this project pretty much behind us now, we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming and life will return to normal again.

One of the best parts of this whole thing, is that Jamey finally gets his own room. Until Amanda was able to move into the new space, Jamey had been stuck in about a 6'x10' room with no closet. Now he has a much larger room with space for all of his toys (which gets them out of our living room) and a closet. He loves it!

I have taken over his old room as my office/hobby room, which should be plenty of space for now.

We had moved everything out of the building and into our house (and my in-law's garage) prior to the renovation. Now that we each have our own spaces again, we can all get our things organized and not be tip-toeing around each other anymore. We finally have our house back! :-)

I'm hoping to be able to keep up on this a little more often now that the project is complete. Jamey has come so far, and there are so many things that I really should have been writing about but just never took the time. And the business continues to amaze me with how well it's doing (thanks to all of Amanda's hard work). Life certainly has changed around here. And it's definitely for the better!

Wow, it's been a long time

So I haven't really been been keeping up with the blogging, because I've been busy keeping up with my son. He just turned two last week, and is turning out to be an awesome little guy!

He is so happy, and everyone who meets him adores him. My wife and I have been amazed at how happy and friendly he is all the time. The only time that he really gets crabby or naughty is when he's ready for bed. But since we've realized this, he's been even easier to put down for naps, and to bed at night. We just have to catch him at the right time. If we wait too long, he can get over-tired and things can get a little hairy... :-/

The business is still going along quite well, with Amanda continuing to run it and me continuing to be Jamey's primary care-giver. We both love this arrangement since we are both doing something we love. It's amazing how much better life is when you're not doing something because you have to, but rather because you want to. I am actually looking to completely quit my old day job (again). I've been working one day a week for about the last eighteen months now, but it's time to stop that and only work projects now. Doing this will allow us just that much more freedom to schedule our lives and do what we need/want to do whenever we feel the need/want. :-)

It still blows me away that we have this opportunity. I feel like I'm practically retired at age 34. My father-in-law is now looking to retire soon as well, and this has really driven home the feeling, because once that happens no one will be leaving the house on a regular basis to go to work. Our only obligations will be to get our packages to the post office. It's kinda crazy when you think about it!

In order to facilitate the growing business, we have decided to move it into one of our out buildings. This will nearly double the amount of space that we can dedicate to the business, and will make it much easier to setup an efficient workflow. It might be a bit of a slow process, but it will definitely be worth it in the end. The building is currently being used for storage for a lot of our extra/seasonal stuff. In order to allow us to use it for the business, it is going to take some slight upgrading including some electrical changes, weather-sealing, flooring, and paint. We also purchased a ton of shelving from one of our small suppliers who recently went out of business, so we'll have plenty of space to organize the business stock, and some more left over to help organize the storage space. It's an exciting change, and Amanda and I can't wait for it to be completed.

I'll also have a small workshop area in the building like I do now, and am looking at ways to add some new items to our product line! It will give me something more to tinker with, and hopefully allow us to grow the business even further. :-)

I guess that's about it for now. Maybe I'll post some pictures soon of the building before we got started, and some progress pictures along the way...

Let the shipping begin!

Well, we've shipped out a few orders so far since wedding season leaped upon us, but today we decided to take a picture of our assailant. So here you can see approximately $1000 worth of product going out the door.

The largest package is the culmination of about a month of work. The bride contacted us right around Christmas, and we just shipped her invitations out today. That order alone is about $850 of the total, and all told it probably took us less than 20 hours of work to produce. That's roughly equal to what I brought home every two weeks from my previous job. Granted, that was after taxes, insurance and 401K. But that was also after four times as much work in half the time (80 hours of work in two weeks). So I'd say this is definitely a better option. :-)

I think I've mentioned before the amazing amount of freedom that has come with making this change to working from home. But I guess it still surprises me sometimes. Between my wife and I, we do tend to work more hours in a given day than I usually did before. But we also enjoy a lot of freedom that we didn't have before. We typically wake up to the sound of our son in the morning rather than an alarm clock. We don't have to go to bed so that we can get up early and drive to work. We can take a 20 minute lunch, or a 2 hour lunch, and no one can tell us any different. It truly is the best job I've ever had.

Another thing that is great about working for ourselves is the professional freedom. If we really like a product we can push it more. If we don't like a product, we don't have to try to sell it to anyone. There is no high pressure selling. What's more, if we decide that a particular product should cost more because it's harder to produce, we simply raise the price. There's no negotiation. We don't have to try to convince the boss. We just do it. If the customers like the product but don't like the price, they'll let us know.

On top of this, we can also immediately decide if we want to give a discount to a given bride for whatever reason. We can provide products to family and friends at whatever discounted rate we choose, and have no one to answer to. It really makes you feel a lot better about your work when you have more control over the processes and ethics of it.

So many people stress out over their jobs simply because they have none of these freedoms, and feel as though they are nothing more than a cog in a machine with no input whatsoever in their work environments. Working for ourselves eliminates this issue almost entirely. We answer only to our customers and each other. As long as we keep our customers happy, they'll keep us employed.

Our business model is much like that of an eBay seller in that we rely almost entirely on our shop reputation to let customers know that we are trustworthy and provide an excellent product. Because of this we absolutely must provide at least as high-quality a product as our customers are expecting. It must arrive on-time or sooner. And we must be able to communicate with them in a professional and friendly manner no matter what. These are the only things that we can do to make sure that their feedback is always positive.

At the end of the day we are both just so thankful to have been given this opportunity and to be able to make it work. It really is an incredible feeling to be able to make a living, especially in today's economy, without working for someone else. And it all comes down to these little packages that we ship out almost daily.

How to survive working a family business

I read an excellent article recently about starting and managing a family business. The article was sent to me by my mother-in-law and she found it on a blog called Design*Sponge. The article talks about the unique stresses associated with running a family business versus working for someone else. Such things as missing a steady paycheck, having to either pay for your own benefits or go without, and keeping your focus can be major obstacles to the self-employed.

In the eight months that I've been primarily working from home, we have discovered many of the things discussed in this article for ourselves. My wife and I have always spent the majority of our time together, and have even worked together some in the past, although we were not working for ourselves at that time. So the trial period mentioned in this article never really occurred or applied to us. However there was definitely a period of adjustment when I quit my regular day job and began working to take over the business.

One huge advantage that we had was that we were taking over a profitable existing business rather than starting from scratch. As I've mentioned previously, my mother-in-law had started the business and grown tired of it. Because of this, we knew that if we just maintained the status-quo in the business, we'd be able to make enough to cover my day-job salary. So initially this is what we were striving for.

What we didn't really know up front was how much work we were going to have to put in to manage the business in a way that worked for us. Even though it was an existing business that was managing workflow just fine, the methods that were in place simply didn't work for us. So we spent a good portion of the first few months creating and refining a workflow that worked the way we work.

We didn't have the need for any kind of commercial solution like Quickbooks to track our inventory and such. We simply aren't running that complex of a business. So instead we developed Excel spreadsheets to track inventory, income and expenses. We also created worksheets that allow us to track each customer from inquiry to shipment, and this has saved us tons of time.

Much of this type of business management is something that you can only do for yourself. Most people (especially the creative and entrepreneurial types) aren't going to be able to find an off-the-shelf solution for these types of workflow management that will satisfy them completely. There will always be a portion of the worksheet that you don't use, and something that you wish was there, but isn't. So it really does help to just sit down and create your own. I think we're currently working on our fourth revision now. Each time we get ready to print a new set we sit down and discuss any revisions and tweak them as needed.

The really nice part about getting the business flow nailed down in a way that works better for us, is that we are now doing the same volume of business in less time. Changes in equipment have had a major impact on that as well, but it's all part of the process of continually refining your workflow, and optimizing it wherever possible.

Because we can maintain the same income level in less time now, we have more free time to spend as a family which was the entire point from the beginning. Even better is the fact that if we get to a point where the need for more income outweighs the need for extra family time for a little while, we should be able to scale up the business and not have to worry about whether or not we can handle the increased workload because we know the process works.

The original article that inspired this one can be found here: http://www.designspongeonline.com/2010/05/biz-ladies-tips-for-running-a-family-business.html

It goes into further detail about working with your spouse, factoring in kids, and managing expectations as well. All of these are subjects that I can (and in the future probably will) expand on too, but I think this is enough for now. :-)

Wedding season is officially on

Now that the holidays are behind us, wedding season has officially begun. Our sales inquiries have nearly tripled over the last week or two, and things are looking to stay pretty steady. So if you or anyone you know is in need of our services be sure to contact us soon!

Back to printing wedding stationery

Well, Christmas is now done, and we've managed to drag ourselves out of bed and back to our computers to pick up where we left off. But first, I have to talk a little bit about one of our gifts this year.

We've been using an old Kodak EasyShare 3.1 megapixel camera to take all of our product photos. It does a decent job, but we know that the quality is nothing compared to what is available now. So we decided that it was finally time to upgrade.

I did a fair bit of research trying to find a camera that was as easy to use as our current one, but had all the new fangled fun to go along with it. After reading a ton of reviews, we settled on a newer EasyShare model. We are now the proud new owners of a Kodak EasyShare M580. We love it! We've been so impressed with the EasyShare line that we figured there was no good reason to stray at this point. We ordered it as a kit from Ace Photo Digital via Amazon. While I typically don't expect to have much contact with an online seller when I'm buying something from eBay or Amazon, I do expect that they will be responsive when necessary. Ace Photo Digital was awesome! I kept checking our UPS tracking number to see when our camera should be arriving. Every time I checked it showed that UPS had received shipping information for our camera, but not the package itself yet. When I contacted Ace Photo Digital about this, they immediately emailed me an affidavit to fill out stating that I hadn't received the package. It was supposed to be 3-5 day shipping and had been 10 days at this point. I printed the form, filled it out, scanned it, and emailed it back. It was that simple. They would ship the new one as soon as they processed the form. However, later that afternoon, UPS arrived with my camera. So I emailed back to Ace, and let them know I had received it. They thanked me for letting them know, and we were all set.

Fast forward to Christmas day when we opened the camera... Here is a great shot of our little dog Jazzy enjoying one of his new toys. Look at the fangs! :-)

This is a great little camera with a ton of features that I didn't expect from such an affordable point-and-shoot. It even shoots 720p HD video and has HDMI out! I think it's safe to say that we won't be missing the old camera. Anyone need a 3.1 megapixel relic to play with?



Now that we've played around with all of our new toys a little bit, it's time to get back to work. So today we've already printed one order for 100 Save The Dates, and another for 40 Invitation sets. It amazes me that we can do this so quickly now. I'm still not used to having our own laser printer here to do our production runs on. I started printing these orders this morning, and before I knew it they we done and ready for cutting. I didn't even have time to finish my coffee while I waited. :-(

We used to print on a couple of different inkjet printers, but they were sooo slooow.... So we had tried outsourcing our printing for a while. It was great quality. The staff was wonderful. But we live about 30 minutes from the print shop, and with a baby, and having to run in multiple times a week for printing it just wasn't feasible. So we spent a couple of weeks researching to find the best affordable home laser printer we could get our hands on.


Thanks to the wonderful group at the Let's Talk Stationery forum, we finally settled on the HP CP3525n. For the type of printing we do, this thing is practically a miracle. It has it's little quirks occasionally, but that's just par for the course when dealing with computers and printing in general. We print on some pretty heavy cardstock which is usually linen textured. Many printers simply can't handle this. Even if they can draw it through their paper path, you tend to end up with severely curled pages, or the printer simply can't produce enough heat to properly fuse the toner to the textured sheet. This HP doesn't have those problems. On really heavy stock it can curl slightly, but not nearly as bad as many others. It'll also handle the envelope sizes that we typically use from A7 for invitations, all the way down to 4Bar for RSVP cards. It truly is an amazing piece of machinery.


Well, I guess that's about it for now. Today will likely be spent doing some more marketing research and continuing to do what I can to drive more traffic to our shop. So if you're interested, or even just a little curious, stop by and take a look at our custom wedding stationery at DearEmma.Etsy.com.

How to attract more people to our product

The key point of being able to work at home and support our family, is keeping our product where people can see it. We need to make sure that as many people as possible see our products every day, because we know that only a small percentage of them will actually buy.



Today we have begun looking even deeper into how to go about marketing our Etsy shop, and optimizing it for search engines so that more people will actually find us. Even coming from the tech world, this is no simple task. There are lots of little tricks that aren't really obvious to anyone who hasn't looked into it or done it before. But many of them that I've discovered so far really are no-brainers when you really think about what you're trying to achieve and the tools that you have available to do it. I haven't purchased any guides like this yet, but it will probably be my next step. We have begun looking for people who have done this, and are living proof that their methods work for shops like ours on Etsy. There are several guides like this available, so you might want to look for one that relates specifically to what you're selling. This one seems to be more general in nature.

I know. It's Christmas Eve and I should be enjoying it rather than working. But if there's one thing that working for yourself teaches you, it's that work never truly stops. We work when we get an email. My wife and I both have iPhones and we both get our shop emails delivered to us constantly. There is no real time off. Sure we're not actually working 24/7, but we work when it presents itself. The best analogy is like being on-call 24/7. This does have some distinct advantages to the straight 9-5 that most people have to deal with though. Just like any on-call job, you tend to have more freedom of movement, and often times you go for long stretches of time without absolutely needing to do anything. We often get to decide when and even where we are actually going to work. Other than the graphic design and production parts of our job, we can do our work from pretty much anywhere that we can get decent internet access. Because of this, we have a fairly flexible schedule in a lot of ways. At the same time though, we are also tied to our work 24/7 whether we're actually working or not. I actually have three email accounts set up on my phone, and when it vibrates to let me know that I have an email, it's hard not to wonder if it's work or personal. I'm checking it constantly. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but it's the way it is. So while my wife is baking holiday goodies, I'm working on fine-tuning our marketing strategies.

I've spent a portion of my day trying to figure out how to draw more people in. I've been tweaking little things like our Etsy shop title, and page names on our own domain. I've added a feed of our most recent items to the side bar on this blog so that more people will see them (assuming anyone other than myself will actually read this). But that's where all of this optimization should eventually lead. The whole idea behind it is to start a following here that will draw people in. Sure I don't want this to be entirely a marketing tool, but that is part of the reason for starting this blog. I still have a laundry list of things to do to tie all of these spaces together. Linking from the shop to the domain and this blog. Listing this blog on our Facebook page. All of these things will supposedly work in our favor and draw more people to our shop, which in turn will make it easier for my wife and I to spend more time with our son, and less time worrying about money. That really is the bottom line. If we know that we have a process set in motion that will bring us a steady stream of customers, then we know we will have a dependable income. So far we've been doing pretty well, but it takes a lot of work to manually advertise on Etsy, and this is the majority of the advertising that we currently do. If we can replace that system with one that is more automated, and less time intensive for us, then we can turn that extra time into family time.

While it may seem like I'm wasting valuable family time right now, by working on Christmas Eve, what I'm really trying to do is give my family a lasting gift. With any luck the little bit of time that I have put in today will pay off down the road. The best part is that I am actually writing this post with my son on my lap, and (for the most part) he's perfectly happy about it. :-)

Hello world...

Such a simple title with such far reaching implications.

It simply amazes me that I am sitting here writing a message that can literally be read around the world, from my living room.

It used to be that "Hello world" was simply the first thing that a programmer would make appear on his monitor. Now it's actually possible for someone to make it appear, and be seen by the world. OK, so being a tech guy this really isn't that amazing to me, but it's still pretty cool.

As you've probably gathered from reading the About Me section on the sidebar, or the description of this blog at the top of the page, I used to be deeply involved in the tech world on a daily basis. I still am. Don't get me wrong. The only two things that have changed here are my focus in life, and my job.

I used to have a round-trip commute of roughly 50 miles a day to work as a System Admin / all-around tech guru. I loved the work and the pay was enough to live on. Then in January I had a son, and my entire world changed.

I never really was a morning person, so it's not like I ever really enjoyed getting up for work. After my son was born, I truly began to dread it. I didn't want to leave him. I tried to take the first two weeks of his life off from work entirely. This didn't really go as planned because due to the size of the company I worked for, they simply couldn't cover all of my responsibilities for me. I worked with a great bunch of highly capable guys, but they needed my help. So needless to say, my plan to only work half-time for the next two weeks, turned into about 70 hours instead.

Once I went back to work full-time, I began trying desperately to find a way out. My wife didn't want me working any more than I did, so she was trying to figure out an escape too. Lucky for me, my mother-in-law had already built it, and was looking for a way out too. See, my mother-in-law has an extraordinary talent for business development. Now we're not talking multi-billion dollar corporations here. We're just talking about developing what many people would see as a hobby into a sustainable, profitable business. She has been doing this for over a decade, and as far as I know has literally given away almost every single business she has developed. Luckily, I happen to be the recipient of her best one to date. In a somewhat surprising and often surreal twist on life, I am now the official owner of an Etsy shop by the name of Dear Emma Stationery.

Now, instead of getting up at 6:30-7:00 in the morning and driving 25 miles to work for someone else, I get up whenever my son wakes me up, and walk out into my living room to work for myself. There are many benefits to this beyond just sleeping in (although I tend to really enjoy that one). I get to be here to witness every new little development in my son's life. I don't have to work all day, and come home to ask my wife "So what'd he do today? Anything new?". I absolutely hated the thought of missing something like his first smile, first step or first word.

So now, my wife and I work together full-time. Not only in business, but more importantly in raising our son. I can't imagine ever going back.