Something I've spent my entire life struggling with, which I'm slowly starting to come around to, is the fact that it's okay to ask for help sometimes :) I find myself in this position in terms of the future of BeautyPopShop. I want to preface all of this by thanking every customer, follower, tweeter, blogger, and FB follower that has supported us thus far--you mean so much to us! BeautyPopShop has not only enabled me to remain a work-at-home-mom, more importantly, it's allowed me to devote my time to our older son's education, testing, therapies, etc. That means everything to us! For those of you that don't know, one of our children has some special medical/educational needs. Let's just say, insurance is not a friend to us, so we pay for quite a bit ourselves. As a result, we don't have as much funds to make some of the more expensive changes we'd like to within BeautyPopShop.
We have been talking and debating over how we should continue to expand and grow for some time and we recently felt it was finally time to take a leap and give an indie fundraising campaign a try.We have personally contributed to similar campaigns for other brands as we are hugely supportive of small businesses and independent ventures, so we thought--perhaps somebody would like to help give us a little push!
There are a few things we'd like to do so that we can evolve to not only meet our increasing demand for polish racks and beauty shelves, but to bring a few fairly intricate designs to fruition that we've been working on for a while. Some of the in-house upgrades we'd like to make simply aren't within our budget and I truly feel we've made every effort to streamline everything we do to the best of our abilities with what we currently have. Since we don't pad our shipping rates and we price our racks fairly (in our opinions) when we take into account materials and labor (and we definitely do NOT skimp on either), our profit margin probably isn't as high as companies that sell at greater mark-ups. Details like having our lumber custom-milled at a local mill (not a large conglomerate such as Lowe's) that we have built a personal relationship with is something we're very proud of and something we feel gives our products an extra special something :) Well worth it to us!
There are 2 major things we'd like to do with the funds we raise:
- Purchase several new pieces of equipment to help production move along a bit faster and to enable us to do thing we are not currently able to do.
- Make some prototypes for new (slightly more complicated) products we've been working on for some time. Prototypes can be pricey for large pieces as I'm sure you can imagine--especially because we build our prototypes out of the same materials we use for the pieces we sell to ensure everything works out perfectly, weight is correct, etc. And it is rare that our first prototype is the one we settle on--there's always tweaking no matter how carefully we plan out designs. We're picky, what can I say? ;)
We don't expect any of our followers to feel compelled to donate any money towards our campaign and perhaps we won't raise much of anything, but we thought it was worth a try to see if anyone would be interested in giving a little boost to a small business that creates handcrafted designs that start and end within our walls. If you know of anyone that might be interested in contributing, please feel free to share information on our campaign. If not, that's fine :) You can see our campaign here: http://www.indiegogo.com/beautypopshop?a=1617977
Regardless, thank you for supporting us in any capacity! Your support means the world to us and we plan to continue to do what we're doing regardless of whether or not our campaign is successful! We don't plan on going anywhere ;)
