This week has been a real mixed bag. We've had some super awesome Frilly Industries news, but we've not been able to act upon it yet as we've had a number of We are Frilly deadlines all colliding at once. Fortunately, Louis has been providing us with ample licks and snorkles (he snuffles like a pig!) and has kept us entertained and reasonably destressed via his sun-dial antics shifting himself across the studio floor as the sun moves around the room.
"Sun worshipper 02 #bostonterrier @frillyind #frillyindustries"
"Sun worshipper 01 #bostonterrier @frillyind #frillyindustries"
SO: what's the news?
Firstly, we found ourselves featured on Folksy which was a lovely surprise (which they then tweeted and facebooked and all sorts!) and has led to a lot of interest coming from their direction! Thankyou Folksy for the vote of confidence!
Secondly, we've been accepted as a 'Partner' for notonthehighstreet! 'Partner' is a posh way of saying we can sell our laser cut loveliness through them to a wide range of people. We LOVE NOTHS - their branding, and their curated range of artists and makers. We're hoping we'll fill a little Frilly shaped niche with them - but we won't be able to get started with all of that until next week at the earliest. It's most exciting of all as they claim to only accept 5% of those who apply to sell with them - so it feels like a nice bit of validation that we're heading in the right direction.
We've been tinkering with our packaging a little bit - we've kept prices as low as we can, whilst still sending items out in beautiful packaging.. we've sourced some boxes locally in the Jewellery Quarter (handy!) which are thin enough to be posted Royal Mail 'large letter' (instead of 'small package' - which makes a big difference, despite no difference in weight!) - so we've been figuring out which items fit in which box.. as well as playing with NEW WAX COLOURS - in case you forgot:
We've applied to sell at a number of markets across the year - we're still waiting to hear back from some of them, but the next one in the calendar is in April which feels like it's rapidly rapidly RAPIDLY approaching - we're talking to Karlus G Tailor (our local badass tailor!) to make some custom Frilly stuff for us in time for the market.. photos will be forthcoming!
And lastly we've managed to make SOME time this week to play with Bertha. As well as fulfilling orders trickling through, we finished up a couple of custom orders (including a hot young Michael Caine, which may or may not appear in the shop in the future.. keep your eyes peeled!) and have been finishing off some custom boxes we designed for a We are Frilly project where we've been working with The Lace Guild in Stourbridge.:
The box designs were made from photographs of lace from their collection which we vectorised enabling us to engrave their delicate patterns into box lids. These boxes will be used for our geocache trail around Stourbridge as part of a bigger project we've been working on with the Guild - you can find out lots more about that over at the Load of Bobbins project site!
Ok - shushing now. It's the end of what feels like an incredibly long week for us. If you want to see what kind of weird, fun, shiny, odd things inspire us - then go and follow us on Facebook as we post a lot of links throughout the week to different blogs and sites we've stumbled on that we've found interesting. And now, time for an episode of Community and then BED!