First of all, I would like to come clean.
I am totally re-purposing this week's email newsletter here. Why?
Well, for starters it took me a while to write and I'm quite pleased with it.
Secondly, it gives you an idea of my style of writing and hopefully you enjoy reading it.
Which means if you would like to read more from me, you can join my merry throng of newsletter recipients here.
Now then. You may or may not already know that Branded & Covered is not my first rodeo. I have been printing custom apparel and accessories for years now.
Actually, I have only just stopped. Two weeks ago.
I’ll tell you the Torrid Tale of the Ten Lash Bed Covers and you will feel my pain and see why handing the Doing and Shipping Part over to someone else is such a relief!
A little history first, I came to do what I do now in a round about way, like so many of us do before we find our “thing”.
I was a field sales executive for 25 years and for anyone who doesn’t know the term, that meant I was one of those annoying people in a shiny company car, a machine washable suit and a wheelie pilot bag. I drove, on average, 30,000 miles a year visiting my (mostly male) maintenance and engineering customers and I loved it.
Unfortunately, my ex-husband and my own body did not. He hated me spending so much time with other men (whole other story) and as for my own body, my parents very kindly passed down osteoarthritis to me, which meant that both my hips were deteriorating and driving all those miles was becoming really painful. I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from constantly fighting against the pain and ultimately had to have both hips replaced whilst in my forties.
Something had to change and whilst recuperating from my second op I decided on a Big Change Indeed. I went from selling to mainly burly blokes in workshops to applying lashes to ladies. Quite an about turn, right?
I bought and attended a premium training course whilst still on crutches. All the other trainees were in their late teens or early twenties, but never mind, with enough patience I figured I could learn anything.
I set up the spare room at home as my salon and practiced applying lashes to a dummy head, who I called Elsie. Elsie ended up in lots of random places to scare the children and give me plenty of amusement, as you can imagine.
It turned out I was pretty lousy at applying lashes to actual humans. Unlike Elsie, real people move and fidget and chat. Or sometimes snore. They have eyelashes that go in random directions.
And unlike my fellow trainees, my "slightly" more advanced years were conspiring against me. To be able to see the lashes in sufficient detail I had to wear my glasses with a pair of magnifying goggles over the top. Pair that with a face mask (even before C19) and everything steamed up. Constantly. Fumes from the glue, basically superglue – I recognised the chemical name for it from my sales exec days, badly affected my chest. And arching my back and shoulders for hours on end was leading to dreadful back ache.
Plus, whilst I could do one eye beautifully, all my clients unfortunately had two!
However, something interesting had happened in the background. Whilst setting up my lash salon, I had bought a second hand beauty/massage bed. It was bright blue, so I found a black stretchy cover for it so it would be more in keeping with my décor.
That big, plain black panel spoke to me. It said “I’m a bit bland, aren’t I? You could liven me up with your logo, Jo!”
A seed was sewn.
I set about finding someone to do exactly that. The local printer looked bemused. So I started doing it myself and set about buying in everything I needed:
Plain covers in black and in white.
Heat transfer vinyl in an assortment of colours.
A cutting machine for the heat transfer vinyl.
A big heat press.
A sublimation printer and specialist ink for it.
Sublimation paper.
Packing bags.
Phew. Costly.
Then I taught myself to use all of the above.
My own lash bed cover was just the first and after a few posts on Instagram they really took off among lash techs. I was printing and shipping them not only in the UK but also over to the US and Europe.
Often they wanted matching uniform, too.
This is how I became a custom printer.
It is also how I was approached by a beauty salon in New York to print ten black 6 foot covers, with a large, rather complex pink and white logo on two sides of each.
Wow! Word had really spread and I was delighted to receive such a large order. The most I had printed for one customer had been 3 up to that point; usually my lash artist customers were running their business from a room in their home, like I had been, and so only ordered them singly.
Delighted as I was to be printing on a bigger scale, I quickly realised that this would be a tricky, time-consuming job. I imagined the beauty beds all line up in a huge salon and so it was vital they were all identical, printed in exactly the same position on the covers.
This is quite a feat when you are talking about a huge piece of stretchy spandex fabric.
Each cover usually took me several hours. This order took me over a week, working flat out.
I was so relieved to get it finished, packed and off to the post office. Sending it internationally on a tracked service wasn’t cheap but it was on its way and I could go home and catch up on everything I’d neglected for the last week. And pick up all the tiny bits of vinyl I’d weeded out during the mega-job.
My customer waited.
I waited.
It never arrived.
I chased up the tracking information and it turned out that they had got it all the way to her suburb in New York, to the end of her road and then given up. They couldn’t find the building number so they were sending it back to me.
Whaaaaat?
My customer had wanted them for an open day, so if they didn’t arrive in time she didn’t want them at all.
There was no chance I could get a replacement set to her in time.
I feverishly checked the address with her, yes, all totally correct.
Now, in the world of personalising, it’s totally acceptable not to offer refunds, mainly because you cannot resell something that has been customised.
But we all want to make our customers happy and news of a bad experience can spread like wildfire. Also, this issue wasn’t that the customer had changed her mind or that she had ordered the wrong size or anything like that.
So I refunded her. Which hurt. I lost so much money on that job, but I knew I had used an insured service to ship them, so I hoped I could get that back and went ahead and processed the refund.
My customer was polite and grateful for the refund, but she still didn’t have the covers for her open day that she wanted. I can't imagine she would ever buy from me again.
FOUR MONTHS later, the parcel was delivered back to me. Again, I checked the address label – all totally correct.
I still have the ten meticulously printed beauty bed covers. No one else can use them and maybe one day I will try to peel off the vinyl, though when I apply a print I give it some welly because I want it to last through hundreds of wash/dry cycles so it probably won’t come off.
So, all things considered, can you blame me for wanting to hand all that over to Someone Else?
I still have my Stretchy Cover Company website. The beauty bed covers are the last print jobs I have found Someone Else to do and ship directly. I can’t say I’m sad about that.
They can do it for a lower price too, which in turn will benefit my customers. I have added a full clothing range to the site now because they are also fulfilled by Someone Else.
So now I can build my product range without the stress. Splendid!
Could you streamline your own business like this? Concentrate on doing the bits you enjoy and are best at?
Have a lovely week,
Jo xx.
PS Anyone want to buy some printing equipment?
Come and join the Branded and Covered FB Group with Jo Wildsmith - it's a fun, friendly place for savvy business owners, VAs and group leaders.