Diary of a Start-up: Making Sales

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This is the third in an series of weblogs from one of the owners of redwagon, a business that makes and sells hand-crafted fashion accessories and clothing. Check back often for more from-the-trenches viewpoints on starting and building a business.

Now that our lines are fully developed and our prototypes are made, it's time to start making sales! We are currently visiting with prospective boutiques for our holiday merchandise, and have made some relationships with notable stores on both coasts. We're hoping to place ourselves in shops like The Good The Bad & The Ugly, I Heart, and Opening Ceremony (very young urban fashionistas shops). We filed our quarterly tax returns for the first time, which was much easier than we initially thought with help from a hotline, we have new merchandising leads on the West Coast, and a photo shoot in the works. (We have a photographer friend who's dying to work with us for no cost at all. His style goes right in hand with our work: vibrant, cutting edge, etc. So we are looking forward to getting that organized.)

We've also been exploring the option of working with Paypal to enable our website for e-commerce. We may need to wait until we have a manufacturer because it's not easy to keep up with the stores demand--as we learned last season. It seems like a good idea, but placement in well-known stores could be very valuable to building our brand name. We'll see how the shops respond and take it from there.

Read past diary entries: On the Road, Redwagon