A sparkling way to communicate!

Hi all! We have stepped in the "blogosphere" with our sparkling news. Here I will be able to communicate better with you all, my customers and the reason I am where I am today.

So where do I start, well at the beginning of course.

I am Shell, the owner and now President of Sparkles by Shell, Inc. http://www.sparklesbyshell.com/

A few years ago I was looking for some sparkling attire for my favorite sports team. I found exactly what I wanted on eBay for $45! Now I don't know about you, but I will not pay $45 for a t shirt. So I said to my husband, Eric, I can make that, he rolled his eyes and walked away. See Eric has lived through my many years of craft addiction. I have done everything from floral arranging, to painting to crochet to sewing. I think the only craft I have not tried is scrapbooking, but I have all the supplies for it in my storeroom. Anyway, I search around for the supplies to make my shirt and sure enough found everything I needed and I made my first shirt. Wore it to work the next day (I am a paralegal, by day, sparkling fool by night) and immediately got orders for 5 shirts. That lead me to eBay and my own online store. By May of that year, I had moved into a shop that is a craft show year round. Sparkles by Shell was taking off. I stayed at the retail store for 2 years, but when my law firm moved into downtown Pittsburgh, it became too hard to keep the store stocked, so I moved out. I did move into a local store here in Monongahela, but unfortunately that store only last 9 months. So I was on my own. I began doing local craft shows and kept up with eBay and through word of mouth got bigger and bigger. Soon I began to see a pattern, people wanting to get matching shirts for their groups, the problem was I had nothing to offer the men (most to do not want to sparkle) so I moved into the embroidery world. This was the first time we had to take out a loan for business equipment. SUPER SCARY. But I am glad we did it. I could now offer both stones and embroidery. Soon, the school accounts followed and the dance schools and the corporate logos. But something was missing. Around the end of 2007 I closed my eBay store as it was not doing well (pretty much because I did not have time to post things) and I was growing tired of the constant fee increases and other stuff that goes on, on eBay. As I look at my business today, I realize that I have lost my retail customer. Right now, my biggest customers are schools, dance companies and corporate logos. I do miss the regular retail customer. Which has lead me to create my own blog. While I send out a newsletter (not nearly as often as I should), I feel that this will be an excellent opportunity for me to communicate with you my customer.

So here we go, feel free to comment on this post, ask me questions, whatever. I do think that the eBay store will have to reopen as that I get my best bang for the buck there. So watch for that announcement.

Take care, and keep on sparklin'!

Shell