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My girlfriend for a while has been making hand-made tote bags and selling them.  She became rather famous too!  She was featured in Elle Girl magazine, the local newspaper did a big article on her and one of the local TV stations Saturday morning shows interviewed her.

Unfortunately, all the press had a downfall.  She became overwhelmed with orders and dealing with flaky customers.  It ended up such a hassle and she ended up basically throwing in the towel.

Well fast forward to now.  With the need for some extra cash flow and something to do fashion related it’s time for small business take two!

This time however things are going to be different.  There were many problems with how the business was run last time.  The lessons of what not to do are now known and we’ll be trying to make a go of it doing it proper like.

Notice that I said we.  The biggest change this time is I’m here and going to help her out.  Now, I’m no expert at running my own biz but I do have a certain area of knowledge that I can help her out with.  That’s technology!  Technology alone cannot make your business a success but it can make it easier to manage and operate when done properly.

This was one of the major downfalls of her previous attempt.  All her sales were through her website but she did the entire product listing by hand and used email for sales.  There were too many instances of customers saying they want to buy one of her one-of-a-kind custom bags but would never go through it.  They’d say they’ll mail her a check or money order but then a week or two would pass and no money shows up.  All the while others want to buy the bag too but she can’t because she believes someone is going to pay.  Then a month later the person finally contacts her and says they changed their mind or they couldn’t get the money, etc, etc.

This time the major change is we’re going to run a true e-commerce site.  It’ll be a paypal/credit card driven click to buy site.  Customers will have to pay up front immediately.

So, last night she came over and we sat down and started brainstorming.  We didn’t do anything to structured.  It was mostly just bouncing ideas off each other, looking back at the previous attempt and finding out what went wrong and what we would do different.

I’m going to try to keep a running play by play of everything we do here because honestly this is pretty interesting stuff.  I’m sure my GF will make posts from time to time about our activities too so feel free to stop by her blog Critics Darling as well.