Home sweet home

Monday 8 February was my first day full time on Shoes of Prey - what a brilliant day :)

As mentioned in a previous post, I'm continuing to do some freelance work with The Campaign Palace, because I couldn't bear to part with my advertising family :) In addition to this, we have taken up office space at The Campaign Palace in an unusually quiet corner of the agency. I'd debated strongly with Michael about decorating the space to stamp Shoes of Prey all over it but the very practical business parter that he is, reminded me that we're a bootstrapped start up... so, as you can see, I used our shoes as decoration and I am working on covering the walls with the press that we have had in the last couple of months - something that never ceases to motivate me to go out there and talk to more people about Shoes of Prey!

Michael and Mike have been working from the couch to date. Personally, I need an office environment to maintain routine and focus in my work. I fear that working from the couch would simply result in sporadic tidying of the house and making elaborate meals. Being at The Campaign Palace means that our distractions are minimised to looking at the amazing view and bouncing ideas around with some of the most inspired minds in the country.

Simply being in the same space as The Campaign Palace provides a great opportunity to cross-pollinate ideas and share learnings. Operating businesses side-by-side like this is a new experience for me and I am excited to see how it unfolds.

Have you 'worked from the couch' before? If so, how did it compare to working from an office?

Google products we use

On Wednesday night Mike and I did a presentation to a group of fellow entrepreneurs on how we use Google products to run our business. People seemed to find it useful so I thought I'd put the list of products and a quick summary of how we use them here in case others find new products they can use too. We're a little biased having worked at Google, but we really love these products so if you're not using them all they're worth checking out!

• Google Analytics - We use this to track a whole range of information regarding our websites. Some of our favourite metrics include: number of visitors, traffic sources, countries visitors come from, conversions, time on site.
  
• Gmail, including video chat - This is our most used product and so much of our communication is done here. I even have a slightly odd way of managing my to do list through gmail.
  
• Google Docs and Spreadsheets - 99% of our document and spreadsheet work is done using Google Docs. The collaboration functionality is brilliant, particularly when working with Vanessa based in China.
  
• Google Calendar - Pretty self explanatory but we use this all the time.
  
• Blogger - 22michaels.com is hosted using blogger.
  
• Google Search - I'm sure everyone has used Search but if you haven't played with some of the more advanced features check them our here. I use the currency conversion functionality nearly every day.
  
• Google Image Search - I use image search to find most of the images used on 22michaels. There are copyright issues with just using any image from the web so I use the advanced settings in Google image search to find images labelled for reuse.
  
• Google Insights for Search - This tool let's you peer into all the amazing search data that Google has, basically it lets you see what people are searching for. There are so many amazing uses for this data. Take a look at this video and if that piques your interest there are more linked from there.
  
• Google Local Business Centre - We don't really use this as we don't have a physical location, but if you're business does make sure you list it here.
  
• Picasa - We manage and share all our photos using Picasa, it's brilliant.
  
• Google Translate - A helpful tool for translating blog posts about us written in languages other than English, and also for emailing and chatting with customers who don't speak English.
  
• Google AdWords (the only one that isn't free) - We use AdWords to advertise our business when people search on Google for phrases like 'custom shoes' and 'design your own shoes'. Advertising doesn't get more targeted than that.
  
• Google Website Optimizer - We use this to test different elements on our website to see what converts best.
  
• Sketch Up Here's an earlier example of where we used sketch up to lay out our Fashion Weekend market stall.
  
• Google Apps for your domain - We use this for all our @shoesofprey.com email addresses.
  
• Google App Engine - ShoesofPrey.com is hosted on Google AppEngine.
  
• Google Reader - Mike used to work on Google Reader when he worked at Google and behind Gmail it's probably my second most used product. I read all my news through Google Reader, mainly on my iPhone. It's such an efficient way to read the news.
  
• Google Chrome - The fastest and best web browser, try it out if you don't already use it.
  
• Google Webmaster Tools - A great way to see how Google views your website from a search perspective. Apparently the Yahoo version is very good too.
  
• Google Maps - Invented in Australia and a fantastic mapping tool. I use the My Maps feature a lot when directing people places.
  
• YouTube - The world's second largest search engine. We haven't started using YouTube as a marketing tool yet but it's high on our to do list. Blendtec do it very well!
  
• Using Google on your mobile - The great thing about Google products is that they are web based so you can use them on any device. I use Google Reader and Gmail on my iPhone every day.
  
• Google Wave - Another one that was invented in Australia. We're not using Wave daily just yet, the main issue is critical mass, it's only useful when everyone else is using it. But I really hope it takes off. It's a much better way to communicate than email.
  

For a less Google Centric list of products that we use check out this previous post. And one more that is worth a mention is Brizzly. While not a Google product there are a bunch of ex-Google Reader software engineers working on Brizzly and it's by far the best way to use Twitter.

So that's our list of Google Products that we use. Any that we missed? Any others you use?

Motivation

Working on Shoes of Prey is very motivating. It's extremely rewarding and satisfying to be working on a business where I am a joint owner, and the fact that we're happy with how it's going so far helps an enormous amount too.

That said, there are times when the level of motivation drops a little, and one of those times is now.

I've always enjoyed roles that involve customer service because I like making people happy. The flipside of this is I don't like disappointing people, so I don't enjoy customer service at all when I'm not making people happy.

So far our customers are very happy with Shoes of Prey, but Chinese New Year is throwing a few curve balls at us:

• Our first ballet flats will be finished next week which is a little later than we'd promised our customers.
• I love fulfilling special requests like sending leather samples to customers, or allowing customers to make changes to their shoes that aren't in our designer, but our workshops are about to close so we can't do these things.
• And I've probably turned down about 10 customers in the last few weeks who wanted wedding shoes because I can't be confident we'll have them ready in late March or early April for their weddings.

It sounds ridiculous but I almost feel physical pain disappointing customers and turning down sales. And when something isn't enjoyable it's that little bit harder to be motivated to do it, the mind wants to escape and think of something else.

All of that said I'm still very motivated and this isn't a major issue, but I'd love to hear thoughts from others on how you stay motivated when times are tough.

Image Credit.

Jodie is joining us full time!

We're very pleased to announce that Jodie is going to be joining us full time on Shoes of Prey! When we started the business we figured initially there would be more for Mike and I to do in building the website and getting the operations up and running and that we could get Jodie's input on weekends and in the evenings. That also meant that Jodie and I weren't putting all our eggs in one basket in case things didn't turn out as we hoped.

We're very happy with how Shoes of Prey is going and we've hit the point where we need Jodie full time working on new shoe designs and on our marketing and PR efforts.

The Campaign Palace where Jodie works have asked her to stay on as a freelancer. She loves working there so she's going to do that, but for the majority of the week she'll be focusing on Shoes of Prey, hooray!

Customer Feedback

We spend a bit of time each week going through our traffic sources in Google Analytics, and also searching for Shoes of Prey on Google and Twitter to see who's been writing about us. Discussions about Shoes of Prey in forums are a great source of customer feedback, and it's great to join the conversation and answer questions. Reading blog posts and news articles gives us ideas on what's most interesting about our business from a press angle. We've also found our offline retailing and website chat to be a great source of ideas as we get to speak directly to customers. And of course this blog is an amazing source of feedback and ideas.

We've been getting some good coverage this week on European blogs and we came across this post yesterday. Those images of the designed shoe next to the photograph of the shoe are better than anything we've done to promote our concept. Some of the shots highlight the photography colour issues we've been having, particularly with reds and pinks, but most of the photos and designs look great next to each other. We'll be borrowing this idea for some of our future marketing efforts - feedback in the form of other people's blog posts is great!

Any interesting ways you get feedback on your business?

International orders welcome...

This year we want to take Shoes of Prey to the international market. One problem though: up until now we've only supported transactions in Australian dollars. Consequently international orders/press haven't exactly been off the charts.

This week we fixed this. We now support the following currencies:

• US dollars
• Japanese Yen
• Canadian dollars
• Euros
• Pounds
• New Zealand dollars
• Australian dollars

It will be interesting to see what impact this has on our conversions, however we've already noticed an uptick of European blogs posting about us.

On a technical level, we're using the free IPInfoDB IP database to determine the user's likely country, and then we choose the currency from that. We then store the currency in a cookie. You may also notice that it takes 2 pageviews for the correct currency to turn up. This is because we detect the currency while the first page is loading. However that's okay because that is usually the homepage, which doesn't contain prices.

Please test it out for us and let us know what you think! Did we select the best currency for you?

Chinese New Year

We're just in the process of finding out just how much China slows down to celebrate Chinese New Year. Both of the shoe workshops we work with are closed for the month of February and the timing couldn't be worse, some of our custom designed shoes are in the February issue of Marie Claire and the last week has been our biggest for both traffic and online orders - so we're going to also have a delay in making the shoes at the start of March because we'll have a larger backlog than we expected. So we've been telling customers that their shoes won't be ready until late March and so far so good, our customers seem to be understanding.

Still, it's not ideal and it's a good lesson. We thought we were managing our manufacturing risk by having two workshops to make our shoes, but that doesn't work when they are both in China and both close for Chinese New Year! For next year we'll either have to find a workshop in another country to help plug the gap, or speak with the workshops and see if some of the shoe makers would be interested in taking a shorter break in exchange for a higher rate of pay.