Sunday August 13th, 2006

I am at the store this afternoon trying to sort thru some catalogs and place some more orders.

I never realized how hard it was to predict what customers are going to want to buy. I know retail well from the Michael's end and the coordinating events end but that is soooooooooo
different than from a LSS owner end. Sometimes it is just over-whelming looking thru all these catalogs. I have been keeping notes of what customers comment on and what I over hear during crops. So hopefully I am making the right choices :)

We had another late night crop last night. We had 6 of us plus one of the ladies brought her
2 preteen kids who are making a scrapbook album as a gift and another mom brought her 9 year old son who was making pages also. I also got to meet someone off the 2-peas board a real sweet gal (Alecia). She made some gorgeous pages!!!!! I would steal a peek every once in a while but didnt want to interrupt her. (I know some people come to crops to really focus and work while others come to socialize) Which brings me to my next thought. How to handle the situation when customers ask if they can being their preteens/kids to a crop stating that they are coming to actually scrapbook. I know alot of gals like the night away from home to be away from the responsibilities of kids, the house etc. It's their night out. But then again I dont want to offend the customers that ask. I thought about maybe having Friday nights as gals night only or vice-versa with Sat and then accomodate the moms/kids on the opposite day. But then that wouldnt always work with everyone's schedule. So I am definately going to have to work on that. Everything went very well and the kids/preteens behaved wonderfully and made several pages but I just wonder what other gals without kids or kids at home would think. I do think everyone had fun last night. Its wasnt a themed crop this time just a regular ole pizza, sodas, chips, coffee and of course chocolate crop. We did a drawing for a canvas tote filled with goodies from Crop & Glue and everyone also got a goodie bag with some Crop & Glue samples, chipboard shapes, brads, eyelets, rub-on, ribbon etc. and everyone got a 10% discount.. When one gal was leaving she said she would be back to crop on Friday this week so I think she was happy.

Time to get those orders filled and work on some more crop themes etc for September.