30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 13

Yesterday: 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?

Our product line laid out on the wall in the studio.

We started out by taping each of our items up on the wall across from the press at the front of our space. We organized them by type and by set.

It was really helpful to lay everything out together. We're always working on pieces here and there that it's really easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Having the physical item in front of you is really very different than looking at your items listed in your online shop or when working on layouts for your look book or catalog.

Some of our cards and prints pinned to our studio wall.

Working on this exercise together led to some very interesting discussions about the design directions we've taken as well as where we are currently headed. We're thinking about making some pretty big changes to some old favorites as well adding some really fun new pieces.

Overall this was a really fun exercise! Seeing our whole line laid out in front of us was really interesting and really gratifying. It's really easy to forget all of the effort and hard work that has gone into each and every design. We get so caught up with prints, reprints, packaging and shipping that we rarely look at the individual pieces anymore. Even when going through and spot checking or doing quality control, we hardly look at the piece itself. This was a nice reminder of where we came from and will definitely help us get to where we want to go. So much so, that we're planning on leaving everything up, at least for the time being.

Today: Evaluate your current accounting system. What is working? What isn’t? What would make things easier?