Summertime in the Shop

At the moment this summer is a little slow.  Because of Covid I don’t have childcare for my kids, this means my production time is fairly limited as I spend each afternoon with them.  Trying to keep a chill mindset and enjoy the time, but I want to get in the shop and make more cool stuff!

I’m able to produce about 1-2 sets of nightstands per week using evenings and weekends, and these are either already presold off this website, or they get listed on Etsy.  I’m using Etsy to sell premade inventory, but I’m thankful to have plenty of buyers, so once I list things they sell within a few days.  Exception is my chairs, which I presell on Etsy, and this site.  They are a larger item (using space in my shop) so I’d rather build them just after someone orders them so I can make > ship > done.

The record crates remain popular, but I haven’t allocated the time to make any.  My time is so limited at the moment that I’m choosing to produce nightstands only.  Since they sell as soon as I make them, I never get to the record crates.   I think an economist would look at this and say, “time to raise prices to the point where you don’t sell out, then make more stuff until you have inventory, then you can have sales if you need to move product”.  I get that.   At the moment I’m happy with my prices, I want my work to be accessible to people like myself.  The real problem is that I don’t have much time to work in the shop.  This will all get better as Covid gets better, as childcare becomes available I’ll have more time to work and I can see the future working with more product created and sold at similar pricing.

I’m taking this time to build each nightstand thinking carefully about what improvements I can do to make them easier and more fun for me to build, and stronger and more reliable for people to own.  I hope that by fall I have the design really firm so I can keep building them and focus my mental energy on my first product with a drawer, my end table.

So that’s what’s going on.  Working slowly, but thoughtfully as I make my products better, waiting for the fall to start leaning on production again.