30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 12

Yesterday: Review your wholesale process. Come up with 3 ideas to streamline your process and begin implementing them.

L-R: packaged wholesale order ready to ship, Wholesale street in DTLA near the studio and a display of Ink+Smog Editions cards at Urban Radish in the Arts District in DTLA.

Over the past two years, we've been slowly building up our wholesale presence. You can see some of our retailers here. One of our objectives is to turn more towards the wholesale end of our business. This was the main impetus for upgrading to a Heidelberg Windmill press a few years ago. In order to do this, we have spent a lot of time recently reviewing our wholesale materials and trying to rethink our wholesale process.

We've spent a great deal of time discussing where we want our wholesale business to be, but have only just begun working on how to make the process simpler and faster. Yesterday's exercise was really great, it forced us to think about all the different ideas and obstacles we've been talking about but then we had to boil everything down to three ideas.

Working on the wholesale exercise yesterday with coffee.

One thing that keeps coming up time and again in this project, is that it is more than time for us to build our own website. It would be particularly helpful in this regard since it would allow us to create a wholesale portal that would simplify the process both for us as well as for our wholesale buyers.

The second idea we discussed involves our invoicing process. At the moment, our invoicing is cumbersome and a little complicated. We need to do some research into a new method for creating as well as keeping track of invoices.

And third, we would really like to move to Freshbooks. This is very much tied to our second solution. In order to do this, we need to change banks since ours is not currently supported by Freshbooks.

These three ideas are really just a beginning, an entry point into a much more complicated discussion. We will start with these three and see where we go from there.

L-R: A display of our cards at Los Angeles County Store in Silverlake (photo courtesy of their Instagram), the cover of our 2015 Look Book, some of our cards on the Beautiful Things LA bus (photo courtesy of their Instagram)

Today: Assess your product line. Lay out one of each of your items in such a way that you can see exactly what you’re producing. Does everything work well together? What is missing? Where do you go from here?