Imagine a tightrope walker. Holding a long pole over either side of the wire. Or picture the scales of justice. On one side of the pole or scale is playing and experimenting and inventing and making stuff for the shop, on the other side is pricing said stuff and marketing and blogging and bookkeeping (well, bookkeeping should be there, but despite my best intentions it seems to only get attention when required by the tax man). Too much effort on one side at the expense of effort on the other side and balance is lost. Hrm, can one truly lose what hasn't yet been found?
I've been making new wares to share in the Odd Bird Studio shop, but a need for accurate pricing is preventing me from adding them to sales inventory. So while I should be working on my pricing strategy, I am instead focusing on giving Odd Bird Studio a more descriptive identity. It's like voting, really. I find identity - or branding, if you prefer - to be the lesser of two evils at the moment.
With that said, here's my progress:
1. Settled on a new tagline to describe Odd Bird Studio. This has been in the works for weeks, possibly months. After creating and rejecting countless embarrassingly bad ideas, I bid a fond farewell to "handmade wares to feather your nest" and welcome "handmade flights of fancy with an earth friendly focus."
3. Reworking the website content and designing new pages to add. Translating these changes into HTML is going to take a while. When I couldn't access my site the other day, I couldn't even remember the name of my web host to look up the problem. Cascading Style Sheets? Apparently I learned how to work with them, design them and code them, but it's all foreign me now. I hope coding the site will prove to be like riding a bike. Surely it will come back to me. Please?
It just occurred to me that trying my hand at HTML again just might be the push I need to focus on pricing. How quickly the tides shift and one past evil becomes lesser than the new evil. More likely I will hang it all and go back to playing with paper. Or the rye stalks I want to try to fashion into Swedish style Christmas ornaments like these pictured at Ingebretsen's Scandinavian Gifts
How do you strike a balance between the demands in your life? Comment here or join the conversation on Facebook, www.facebook.com/oddbirdstudio
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