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Working at Google was a great, steady job. There were highs, there were lows, but at the end of the month there was a nice steady pay check.
Shoes of Prey is like a crazy roller coaster where you're strapped in by your feet and flung around a crazy non-sensical track at a hundred miles an hour. There's gut wrenching, plummeting lows and fantastic, ecstatically exciting highs. And they come within days of each other.
Last week we met with our supplier who told us their workshop has too many orders and our shoes are now going to take 5 weeks to make. This is on top of some of our first orders already bordering on being late. If we can't get our first orders to customers on time, what hope do we have of encouraging people to spread the word about our business? Queue plummeting low. Fortunately we'd kept in close contact with another potential supplier and over the weekend we sent our first orders to our second supplier. 2-3 weeks is their turnaround which is much better. But now we have a raft of issues to work through around matching leathers and designs across suppliers. We can see a hard but steady rise out of the low.
This weekend was Sydney Fashion Weekend. We invested $4,000 of our not exactly large cash reserves in the event and opening night on Thursday saw pretty dismal sales. Plummeting low number 2 for the week. We tweaked our sales approach, our messaging around pricing and got all our laptops working on the stand, and Friday night and Saturday saw fantastic sales. Plus we've learnt so much from speaking to our customers directly that we've got a good idea of where to focus our energies over the coming month. An ecstatic high only 24 hours later!
It certainly isn't boring running a startup.
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