“So what do you do?”
 
It’s a pretty standard question, regularly asked at parties, club meetings, family gatherings and networking events. But ever since I started my business, this little question has given me big anxiety. Because I don’t know what to say.
 
The easy answer is to tell people that “I work in a drapery workroom”. It’s true, it’s short, I feel comfortable saying it, and it doesn’t generally illicit more questions: a definite plus for my introverted self.
 
Buuuut, this answer is really me hiding. Hiding my insecurities of starting a business behind the cover of having a day job to talk about. I could tell people that I’m a small business owner, but when I say that I feel like an imposter. I feel like Owning A Business is a Big Deal, and that when someone hears that I have a business, they probably have certain expectations. Like that I’m making a profit. Or I have employees. Or I don’t have a day job. All of which are not true. At least not yet. So I have this reluctance to tell people that I am a business owner. I feel like I’m not big enough, I don’t know enough, I don’t have enough experience, I’m not good enough yet.
 
This is no good. I DO own a business. And I can’t grow my business if I’m constantly hiding the fact that I have one. So I made it a goal for 2016 to self-promote, and even wrote it up in a blog post here. But even knowing what I need to do, it’s not easy.

Early on in the year, I met my sister and her friend for breakfast one day, and her friend asked me what I did. And I gave the cop-out answer “I sew…” and got put in my place by my big sister!
 “I thought it was one of your goals to not say that anymore! Aren’t you supposed to talk about your business??” Yikes! Apparently people do read this blog! But she was right, and she gave me the accountability kick I needed to get serious about this goal.
 
I actually practiced with my husband, pretending to introduce ourselves, to try to get comfortable with what I had to say (and he is my hero for not making fun of me for this).  And we cycled through a few answers to see what fits me best.
 
"I’m a fashion designer" – For me, this gives the wrong idea. I’m not at some couture fashion house in New York.
 
"I have an Etsy shop" – True, but my business is more than Etsy. And some people have no idea what Etsy is anyway.
 
"I’m an entrepreneur" – this sounds like I really like to start lots of businesses. I don’t. I just want this ONE business, because it is my passion.
 
"I’m a business owner" – I don’t like just saying I have a business without saying what I do!
 
For now, I’ve settled on: “I own a design business” or “I run an online sewing business” or something along those lines. But it’s still hard to say.
 
 
After settling on what to say, the next step was to put myself in situations where I would need to introduce myself. The only way that I am going to become confident with my self, and my abilities, is if I see that my fears (ridiculous fears of people yelling at me, telling me I’m an imposter) are unfounded. So here we go, out of my comfort zone.
 
I started an Etsy team. I wanted a group of like-minded people in the area, to meet up with and talk about our businesses. To help each other through problems, and celebrate each other’s successes. A group like this didn’t already exist, so I decided to just make it myself. This means that I get to meet new people who come to our meetings! On the scale of imposterism, this was pretty low, because we are all Etsy business people, so I felt more at home.
 
I went to other club meetings. I’ve been visiting some local sewing clubs, like the American Sewing Guild, and the Sewing Professionals Network. This is a little harder to introduce myself at, because there are lots of women with a whole lot more experience than me at these meetings. But I’m trying. I have one more to check out.
 
I contacted store owners. Thank goodness for email, or this would be a truly terrifying process. Still, meeting in person to discuss selling my products in stores definitely takes some self promotion! And as of next week, I will have two local businesses selling my wares!
 
I taught a class. This one was very nerve wracking. I taught a class at the Indy Trade School, all about digital sewing patterns. This was very nerve wracking because teaching someone something means you are telling people that you know a whole lot more than them on that subject. Which is possibly not true at all. But I survived, and my class was very nice to me, and I’m going to submit another class proposal this week.
 
The next step in my journey of self promotion, (aka self confidence) is to ask people to model for me. This would be super helpful, but I’m a very novice photographer, and asking people to be in my photos (that may or may not turn out) is almost laughable to me. But it is something I need to do eventually.
 
Because hey, I can’t let myself get too cozy here in my comfort zone, right?

If you have read my about page, you’ll notice that all of the handmade items in my Etsy shop are made using discarded materials. You might be wondering what exactly that means. Well this post is for you!
 
What I consider to be discarded material:

• Items that are damaged – Clothing, curtains, and materials with stains, holes, or permanent creases that can be salvaged and cut around.
• Headed for the trash – Sometimes new, undamaged, whole materials get thrown away. You would be surprised.
• Secondhand items – There are many times when someone buys new materials, and it sits around for years gathering dust. Then when spring-cleaning comes, the buyer decides it is taking up too much space, and it needs to go.
• Scraps – sometimes you (or I, or a company) buys a material for a certain project, and when you are done, you likely have a certain amount leftover that might seem unusable for your purposes.
• “Seconds” – these are new materials that for some reason do not fit with the manufacturer’s standards and cannot be sold to their customers. It may be fabric that isn’t the exact right color, or it could be that the grain is skewed.

 
 
Why I use Discarded Materials:

• I used discarded materials because I truly believe that they can be made into beautiful, functional products. I am one of those people who hates to see anything go to waste, especially when it doesn’t have to be.  So I intercept the waste and puzzle out ways to use it to create products that someone will love.

 
 
Where I get them:

• Garage sales
• Thrift stores
• Donations from friends and family
• Local workrooms and factories
• Hand me downs
• Websites that sell seconds

 
 
How this affects my products and pricing:

• My products are often one of a kind. I may only have enough discarded material to make one!
• My material costs can vary quite a bit. Some of my materials are free, some are expensive, and they can be anywhere in-between. Each time I make a product out of a different material, the price reflects that specific cost of materials.
• Having one of a kind products means that I spend more time photographing and listing my products on Etsy than someone who is selling the same thing repeatedly. I cannot always reuse my photos or description if the materials change. This also is reflected in how I price things, because each of these things takes time.

 
 
Who benefits:

• YOU benefit because you can be proud of your purchase knowing that it is responsibly sourced and made.
• MY SOURCES benefit. Supporting thrift stores and garage sales helps ensure that people continue to resell their discarded possessions instead of trashing them. And my local workroom? They love knowing that the fabric they can’t use is going to be used by someone else instead of being thrown out.
• THE EARTH benefits because there is less trash going to landfills.
• I (MADELINE STAGE) benefit greatly. It never gets old. Using discarded materials is one of the really challenging and also rewarding parts of my business. It is often very limiting to my work. I usually have to work around not having enough of one fabric or material and knowing that I will likely never be able to get more. But this limiting can be a good thing! Often it’s our limits that force us to be more resourceful and creative.

You may have noticed a change in my prices this month. I have been working hard to standardize my pricing these last few weeks, with lots of excel spreadsheeting involved. My goal by the end of the year is to be paying myself at least for my time sewing and patterning for my business. (paying myself for my admin is a whole ‘nother issue I need to tackle) Right now, all of the money I make goes straight back into the business, buying supplies and marketing materials, etc.
 
My pricing breakdown is something like:
 
Profit I get from Etsy = price + shipping cost - cost to wash fabric - cost of shipping supplies – cost of material – my actual cost to ship - my labor (cost of my time patterning and sewing, cost of my time listing the item, cost of my time shipping the item) – 3.5% Etsy fee – (3%+.25 direct deposit fee)
 
Wholesale Profit = (retail price  * .5) - cost to wash fabric – cost of material – cost of my product presentation and packaging– my labor (cost of my time patterning and sewing, cost of my time interacting with store owners)
 
I am trying to juggle these two formulas, and also trying to standardize some of my profit margin: 25% if it’s resale, and 15% if its wholesale
 
That 15-25% profit? It is there to help cover random overhead costs of my business: my car fuel, my administration work hours, my internet, my website, assets like my camera and much more. Is it too high? Is it too low? I’m not sure yet. Only time will tell. Covering those overhead costs depends a lot on how many items a year I sell, as well as how expensive of an item it is, and the total of my overhead costs, all of which I don’t have nailed down yet. I also haven’t been super strict when it comes to these numbers, because the products I sell are so varied in price. So 15% of a $10 item is much much different than 15% of a $400 item. So sometimes I adjust accordingly.
 

I have no idea if I am doing this right. In fact, I have no idea if there is a “right” way to do it. It is simply what I came up with for now. And this change in pricing isn’t final. My product prices are very likely to change again. Here’s why:

1. I use discarded and secondhand materials in my work. This means that my material costs are constantly changing. I have tried to average the costs for my spreadsheets, but if there is a big fluctuation in material costs for an item I’m making, its final cost may go up or down to reflect that change.
2. I am constantly learning. I’m still trying to nail down the best way to calculate my costs, and therefore my pricing. Every new bit of business information I learn can end up changing how I price my products.
3. I am getting faster at production. When I first make a new product, it may take a while. I have to develop a pattern, and figure out the best way to make it, create a listing, and take photographs. But, the more I sell, the more I make, and the more I make, the faster I get at sewing it, the less time I spend listing and photographing it, and the cheaper it gets to produce, which means I can pass those savings onto you.
4. Wholesale. This is a whole new ballpark, as you may know. Generally if I wholesale my products through another store, that store will only pay me 50% of what the retail value is. And this changes everything. If I end up wholesaling an item, I may have to charge a little more to get a profit from it. Which means my retail price in my own Etsy shop would have to go up too, so that I’m not selling my product for less money than the boutique down the street. No one is going to go for that. None of my items are currently being wholesaled, so most of my prices right now do not reflect that. Yet.

 
 
The moral of this story? Pricing is complicated. And in order to be a profitable business (that can actually pay me) I am doing my best to figure out how to price my items to cover all of my costs. So bear with me as I make changes. They aren’t random, or greedy, or personal attacks on your wallet. They are just a reflection of a small one-woman business trying to figure it all out as she goes.
 
P.S. I am always open to tips on how to price things! Let me know if you have any suggestions, or see that there is anything I can do better!

Feb 16th will mark two years of Goheen LLC being a legit, legal company. Anniversaries always make me reflective. So I thought I would share:
 
The story behind the name Goheen:
 
For the longest time, having my own business was always a sort of “maybe someday” idea. Something that sounded like it might be OK, but I was in no hurry to put in the effort, and I thought that I didn’t have enough knowledge or experience to start yet. The most that I did was start a Facebook page. It was a place that I could show off my photography and my sewing projects to any friends and family who cared to see it. But I struggled with what to name the page. At the time, I was engaged, which meant that in the near future I was going to be giving up my family name, and my family home all at once. Now, I know not every 23-year-old wants to live at home with her parents forever, but I was the exception. Being a “Goheen” felt like a very defining thing for me. I love my family dearly, and my Goheen childhood and my Goheen home felt like too much to give up completely, so…. I decided I wouldn’t. Goheen became the name of my company, and an ever-present reminder of my values, my family, and my history.

Making it legal:
 
So great. I had a Facebook page: Goheen Designs. What next? Nothing really. I continued to sew, and continued to put up photos of what I worked on, but the thought of being an actual business didn’t even cross my mind again for the next two years.  I was busy planning a wedding, sewing a wedding dress, getting married, moving cities, getting a new job, and getting used to being a wife. It wasn’t until way after all of the above that the idea of starting my own business even came back into my head. And it came back because of that new (now a year old) job.

I was working as a sewer in a factory. Now, I want to preface this part of the story by saying that this was a good job. There were several employees at this factory that had been working there for 40 plus years. So obviously it is a great job for some people. Just not for me. I have all the respect in the world for factory sewers, because I could NOT handle that job.  I love sewing, but part of what I love about it is the whole process of designing, problem solving, and working with my hands to create something from start to finish. Which is obviously not what happens in a factory production line. There were times when I would sew the same 3 minute step on a bag over and over and over for every hour of every day for an entire week. This mindless task, combined with the fact that I couldn’t talk to my coworkers (too far away to hear) and I couldn’t use headphones (a safety hazard) meant that I was stuck inside my own head, going more than a little bit crazy.

There are only so many things that you can think about in an 8-hour time period without outside stimulation of some kind. I made up musicals in my head, played games with myself, reran episodes of the bachelor in my minds eye (my guilty pleasure show), and generally went insane. After a few months of this, I started desperately texting people on my 5 min breaks. “Ask me a question,” I would say. “Give me something to think about.” “Tell me something interesting.”

By the time Jan 2014 rolled around, I had started a new strategy. My husband Eddie had gotten me a book for Christmas Grow. How to take Your DIY project and passion to the next level and quit your job. It was a small book, that was part informational, part workbook, and easily overlooked by the passing glance of a manager. I kept it open on the table beside me as I worked, and one by one went through each of the questions it proposed in my head. It brought up a single, overarching question for me to start with:
What is your ultimate vision of success?

I hadn’t given this too much thought in quite a while. I knew that I wasn’t happy with my current job, so I now knew in part what I didn’t want, but what about what I DID want? What would “success” look like? And what about ULITMATE success? I had hours and hours of time to think, so I gave it hours and hours of thought. I let my imagination run free, with absolutely no logical limiting to what might actually be reasonable, or possible. After all, this was ULITIMATE. If I had to go to a job every day for the rest of my life, and really enjoy it every day, and feel fulfilled and content and successful, what would that job look like? Well, no surprise, it looked like something that didn’t actually exist in real life. A sort of cross between a design studio/community center/coffee shop/thrift store/club meeting hub/school/library/art gallery/dance floor. I would be able to design patterns, teach people, learn new things, participate in and facilitate social gatherings, give back, focus on local, repurpose, constantly try new things, and be creative. Boom. Done. I now had an ULTIMATE goal. Completely ridiculous and insane, and also… amazing. If I could realistically create a work environment for myself that looked even a tiny bit like this ultimate dream, I would call that a Success.

So what would be the first teeny tiny baby step to take towards my ultimate dream career? Legally become a business. Check. Well, a month of research and utter confusion about how to legally become a business, and THEN, on Feb 16th, 2014 Goheen LLC became real: CHECK.
 
Now to work on the rest of it….