New Items !

I finally bought replacement bearings for all of the wheels that were pillaged  from my derby skates while they were idle during my pregnancy.  Which reminds me, anyone who has used up skate bearings, please contact me, I will trade Caustic Threads merchandise for them. I plan to have them in time to get to go to a fellow duke city derby skaters birthday skate party this weekend. I am looking forward to getting back on skates, and I have a lot of weight to loose so I am looking forward to the exercise. In a few more months Penelope will be big enough to ride in a bike trailer and I can start biking with both of my girls, and my husband got a new used bike so we can enjoy weekend bike trips again. 

I have several new items in my shop:

now I carry children's long sleeved tee shirts

This is a new shirt design, a Plymouth fury

I also recently started carrying v-neck tee shirts

This motorcycle is also a new design, and it has been popular with our friends. 

There are other new designs, but I will leave it at that and try to post my other new stuff next week. I also recently purchased some fabric markers... something that I had always thought were pretty uncool... until I had the idea to color in my screen printed designs. The result is really pretty, so here is a preview...

This is my daughter, wearing a hand dyed and printed Rose tank top (this is also a new screen design) that also hand colored with my new fabric markers and embellished with rhinestones. I really love how it turned out. 

I still have a tutorial to post... I would not have guessed that I would drag my feet this much with that... I will also be featuring another etsian this Friday. 

Take care for now :) 

♥Erica 

I opened shop again last Wednesday.

I was a little hesitant to open up because  there are so many things I want to do that I wont have time for now that my shop is open again, but I really love my "job" and running my own business so I was itching to start again, too. 

At first it felt a little hard to balance work and family time, especially with a newborn who eats every 2-3 hours for 45 minutes at a time, and a two and a half year old who is not sure what to make of her little sister. I was also not sure what to expect in the way of sales. Etsy changed their default search to relevancy while my shop was "on vacation". I ended up with a sale within 10 minutes of opening up, and they have remained steady. There is still a ton of work to do to make my shop show up higher on relevancy searches, so I expect to be working long days for a while now.

I finally got ladies Vneck shirts to start stocking. I am not sure which designs will work best, but I am excited to experiment. I have a few other new products up my sleeve,  and pretty soon I need to restock long sleeved shirts for the colder months. I also have some new tshirt designs that will be popping up soon.

I have some fun posts planned for this week. I have seller to feature and also a craft  tutorial, so I will be back soon.

Manic Monday: Back To business.

As usual it is a busy Monday morning, Right now I only have time to pop in and write a blog entry because I have pots of shirts dying and the closer I keep an eye on items I dye the better they usually turn out.

I did finally reach my goal of 1000 sales last week, and  after a good week it looks like I am getting a little closer to my sales goals for the month as well.  The ebb and flow of sales is always surprising. Last week was one of my best weeks ever in caustic threads, and the week before was one of the slowest. There was a time where I worked on commission, so naturally sales was part of the job. Anytime we would get discouraged by a slow down they would tell us to remain consistent and not to let the slow day affect how we did things, and never to panic,  and eventually things would even out. It was hard advice to follow when you were watching your paycheck get flushed down the toilet, but it proved to always be true. It has been a long time since I thought about that advice, but it is a good way to remain calm when the anxiety of low sales hits you.

We had a great weekend here,  My mom and her husband were in town for the week and my brother and his wife drove up for the weekend too. It was fun and eventful to have so much family in town, and a little bit of a relief on Sunday afternoon when I got to get back to some of the work I needed to do.

I hope everyone had a great weekend!

♥Erica

Almost There!

I  opened Caustic Threads before I started listing items, but I know that I started listing items April 15th of 2010. I wish I could say I had ambitious-or really any- goals for caustic threads when I started listing items, but I didn't.   I didn't even open it with the expectation that Caustic Threads would primarily be a TShirt store, but rather a sewn clothing store, because as you may know I am also a fashion designer and Caustic Threads was intended to be my indie design label since I made the best decision of my life and decided to be a stay at home mom instead. The problem with having a store of all intricate designs that I have to sew to measurements is that while I LOVE designing, and can sew well, i don't love sewing the same thing over and over, especially if it is complicated.

I had been interested in screen printing for a long time and decided early 2010 to invest in a screen-printing set-up- the initial costs for my business were very low and I am still happy with it. I started out buying overstock shirts and then as I made more I was able to invest my earnings into made to order shirts, which is when my sales really started to take off.

Early January I finally set my first sales goal for caustic threads. I wanted to make 1000 sales by April 15, 2011. I didn't quite make it but now it is April 19th and I am at 997 sales! It is so close I feel like I reached my goal anyway! I am so thrilled that Caustic Threads has been so successful, and I love designing the art for my shirts as well as dying and printing them!

So cheers! To goals, and reaching them... or at least getting REALLY close.

Here are some of my newest items at http://www.etsy.com/shop/CausticThreads

Good luck with all of your goals!

Take care!
♥Erica