The STUFF Sisters - Entrepreneurs

Unemployable

I have reached an age where I know for a fact that technology is outpacing me. As my husband and sister read this, they are cackling because I am the least tech-savvy and tech-interested person in their families.

I have mentioned to friends and strangers that one of the deep-seated reasons I support the Women’s Employment Network is because I am convinced that I am going to have to utilize their amazing services if this dream business I share with my sister ever fails. The main reasons: I really don’t know how to make a PowerPoint display, and I can get easily tripped up on implementing calculations in Excel. Clearly, I will need to be trained for today’s workforce.

Unemployable in today’s society. That’s me.

Thank the goddess I am an entrepreneur.

September starts our busiest four months of the year at STUFF. Right now, I am buried up to my eyeballs in paper, cardboard, pricing labels and spreadsheets. Casey, my partner in crime, is buried in artist product, display ideas, and training of current employees and possible new hires. It is a killer month that we love…and live through.

Last month in New York, on our morning walk to work, I saw two men sorting – by color! – empty glass bottles. The street on which they had set up shop was closed due to the construction of a new subway stop. They had found a tree for shade and were color-sorting glass and stacking it. The sound of their endeavors caught me first and found me fumbling for my camera. Not only were they helping to save the planet, they were working quickly and efficiently in a makeshift work environment. What the end result of their work was, I do not know and did not ask.

My mind raced to these images yesterday when I had set up a work station for myself on three cardboard boxes right outside my office door and was holding the papers from blowing in the fan with a tack into the cardboard. An hour later, I thought of those men as my sister climbed the stairs with her hand drill, cell phone, stuffed file folder, and cup of iced coffee. She, too, was setting up shop and getting to work where she needed to be, which was not at her desk.

She amazed me because she had brought her phone to work. Mine? Well, mine was way over there next to the keyboard of my computer, being charged. Someone had forgotten to charge it over night. Understandable. She must have been really busy.

p.s. These men had me mesmerized. Look at how tidy their work space is. The boxes are lined up perfectly and practically squared to the curb. Right there on 35th Street just west of 9th Avenue.

Family Business

Co-owning a family business is a remarkable adventure. My life intertwined with my family on a daily basis. It works for me. It is one of most enjoyable aspects of my career.

This week my daughter is out of school two days for parent/teacher conferences. We talked about her options for these two days, because Mom taking off two days was not an option. She picked work one day and Nana’s house for the second day.

I loved having her with me. She begged to do “real work” with our team. And, our team was very kind to include her in their tasks.

It is difficult to describe how I feel when I watch her working at the store. The word pride seems limited. Joy, love, happiness, lucky, blessed…and so very much more.

Blank Screen and Blocked

This is what happens when I am depleted. I can’t think. I can’t create.

Does there really need to be one more blog about some small business owner trying to get the creative juices flowing? I don’t know the secret. I can’t help you right now, because at the moment I can’t seem to help myself.

The truth is, I really wish we had a million more customers that already knew how fantastic our store is and how hard our artists work and how creative our team is and, and, and, and blah, blah, blah.

Because at the moment, I am stuck. I am wide awake and ain’t got nothing happenin’.

I don’t want to be overly dramatic. Our store is good. We have managed to haul our butts thru this “economy from hell” with smiles on our faces. We have done with our store what most people told us couldn’t be done. We have grown, evolved and taken risks. And it keeps working out.

It’s just some mornings, I wish so deeply that I would wake up to a truckload of new customers that just magically discovered our store. And were standing outside waiting for the door to open.

Then I wouldn’t feel the need to stare at a blank screen at 12:57am on a Monday night trying to think of the next idea that will create sparks and light the way to our door for that next group of new folks.

Casey

In Retreat

Sloane and I are in an Internet retreat learning fabulous tips and tricks for our blog posts. We know you will be very impressed with our new skills. Okay, not really, you probably won’t notice anything, but please feel free to find joy in knowing that we are learning new skills to throw around our blog.

Casey Simmons and Sloane Simmons working on pursuegoodstuff.com — Website work is so much fun!

The Big Time

This past week while we were in New York City, we ran into a friend from home in one of the long aisles at the convention center.

There it was. A rack of Zippernut Press cards. So pretty. So tall. So ripe for the picking.

STUFF can no longer state emphatically that these homegrown cards are “only available at our store” because other stores in the nation can now get in on the sweet action. These cards are very, very funny and it’s past time for them to be in the limelight. We will still have the nation’s largest Zippernut collection – especially of the cards dedicated to cancer that benefit cancer research at the KU Cancer Center – and we are ready for this wild ride to continue.

Kansas City knows how to grow an entrepreneur, and we’d like to think that we had a part in making this dream come true for this local artist.

Sloane