Business

The business side of Art of the Firebird

Recent Doings

June 21, 2010 in Business, Miscellaneous by Julia | 1 comment

I know it’s been quiet here, mostly because I’ve been focus­ing a lot of my spare-time atten­tion on the merger of my Art of the Fire­bird busi­ness with Andrea’s Four Tails Lam­p­work. After almost three years of doing shows together and man­ag­ing money together with­out killing each other, or even a major snit, we decided that we might as well do an offi­cial busi­ness merger. A merger deserved a new name, so we decided after much debate on Cop­per Dancer Designs.

We’ve incor­po­rated as an LLC, set up a web­site and a joint shop at Hand­made Artists Shop, and are just wait­ing on that darn GA tax id to fin­ish up the paper­work. We’ve also done three shows under the CDD name: ART­lantis 2010, Avon­dale Art-B-Que, and the June Down the Street Bead Show. We’re work­ing on a bunch of appli­ca­tions for fall shows, so if you want to stay up to date on that, you’ll need to go over to our new web­site and sign up for our mail­ing list, or just keep check­ing the event cal­en­dar there.

Art of the Fire­bird is not going away, but I’ll keep most of the business-related stuff over at Cop­per Dancer Designs. That will let me post more per­sonal things here, like my bel­ly­dance adven­tures, per­sonal mus­ings and rant­i­ngs, and so on.

Photo Woes

November 28, 2009 in Business, Techie Trivialities by Julia | No comments

I was try­ing to pho­to­graph some of my chain­maille bracelets tonight to get them listed at 1000 Mar­kets and Art­fire. Pho­tog­ra­phy isn’t my favorite part of the process, but tonight was par­tic­u­larly aggravating.

One prob­lem I’ve had in the past is get­ting a clearly focused pic­ture because I run into depth of field issues. In auto­matic mode, my cam­era shoots at a low aper­ture, typ­i­cally around F5.6, which means I don’t have a lot of DOF. If I up the aper­ture, the cam­era thinks there isn’t enough light. So I’d got­ten a day­light flu­o­res­cent bulb for one of the reg­u­lar lamps in the stu­dio, and I added that to the two photo flu­o­res­cents I have in there. When I turned all three on, it cer­tainly SEEMED bright enough in there, even with the photo tent fil­ter­ing the light.

I decided to try to fig­ure out Av mode (aper­ture pri­or­ity) on my cam­era. Well, the user man­ual doesn’t exactly explain it clearly, but I finally man­aged. So I set the aper­ture to F16, but then couldn’t get it to accept a slow enough shut­ter speed. I gen­er­ally use the two sec­ond timer on the cam­era, and have it on a tri­pod, so I should in the­ory be able to use a long expo­sure. But the cam­era just wasn’t happy.

I finally got some pic­tures taken, just to trial-and-error. When I down­loaded them, I found that the ones on the black back­ground seem a lit­tle over-exposed, if any­thing, and the ones on the beige tile back­ground are a lit­tle dark. I’ll have to see how well that can be cor­rected in GIMP.

Some of the pic­tures seemed to focus through the full depth of field, but most didn’t — either the front part or the back part were still blurry. I really wish I had a “Pho­tograph­ing Glass and Metal for Dum­mies” guide so that the cam­era could do its job the way I want!

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Show, Thoughts on Day 2

November 22, 2009 in Arty Stuff, Business by Julia | No comments

Today’s weather was nasty, so between it and the econ­omy today wasn’t a lot bet­ter than yes­ter­day at the show. I mean, we only made ONE sale (a rather good one, to be sure) between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Wow, just wow. It did pick up between 3 p.m. and close at 5 p.m., but that wasn’t enough to make up for the lack of sales earlier.

In talk­ing to the other ven­dors, I’d have to say that sales were uni­ver­sally bad. I know that Audrey wasn’t happy, not just because of the slow traf­fic and closed wal­lets. Appar­ently the Cobb Gal­le­ria man­age­ment told the won­der­ful “Miss Daisy,” she of the morn­ing cof­fee and muffins and the after­noon HANDMADE CHOCOLATE TREATS that they “couldn’t” allow her there. Audrey, to her credit, promptly bought all of Daisy’s inven­tory and shared it with us ven­dors — props to her!

It’s not that peo­ple don’t appre­ci­ate and like our work for the most part. We heard the usual com­pli­ments and admi­ra­tion. I did over­hear one woman say to her hus­band that our work was nice but just cost too much; a cou­ple of oth­ers were ask­ing for dis­counts even though they were buy­ing just a few lit­tle beads. I just fig­ure that those peo­ple may not “get” the dis­tinc­tion between the mass-market importers, who will wheel and deal because they have sub­stan­tial mar­gins, and the arti­sans mak­ing one-of-a-kind items on rather slim mar­gins with no real wig­gle room. Plus there are the “Wal-Mart men­tal­ity” folks who aren’t happy unless they can get a bargain…but those peo­ple aren’t our tar­get cus­tomer base anyway.

It’s very hard to keep up a good atti­tude under such a try­ing sit­u­a­tion, but we did our best. We kept the snarky remarks between our­selves and a few other vendor-friends. Buy­ing silly fleece hats, mine a blue camo cat-eared one and Andrea’s a leop­ard cat-eared one, from our friend Tara Roberts and wear­ing them all day helped. We weren’t the only ones, either. Sylvie had a tiger-striped one, and at one point I saw the Chi­nese man that I some­times buy find­ings from in a red devil-ears hat! As we said to sev­eral peo­ple, “ALL the cool kids are wear­ing them today!”

I also made a sec­ond mul­ti­color open round­maille bracelet while we sat there, so I can say that I have open round­maille down pat. I’ll pho­to­graph those and get them up on 1000 Mar­kets or Art­Fire soon for some­one look­ing for a great hol­i­day gift for some­one special.

Show, Day 1

November 21, 2009 in Business by Julia | No comments

It was slow. What can I say? Pretty much we were all in agree­ment — even Audrey, when she came and browsed late in the after­noon, said it had been slow. Of course, we have had shows with slow Sat­ur­days before, and they have usu­ally been fol­lowed by good Sun­days, so we shall remain optimistic.

In the qui­eter moments today, I had chances to chat with some of the other ven­dors there. I found out from Kim St. Jean when she will be teach­ing at William Hol­land Retreat next sum­mer (the last three weeks of July!) so I can account for that in my sum­mer plans. I had a nice lit­tle visit with my lit­tle buddy Chase St. Jean, who actu­ally DID remem­ber me from back in August. I even made another chain­maille bracelet, my first one in open round­maille, using mixed color nio­bium rings.

Even though it wasn’t ter­ri­bly busy I came home exhausted, so it’s really time to go ahead and turn in. Cross­ing my fin­gers for tomorrow!

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Quickie

November 20, 2009 in Business, Lampworking & Glass by Julia | No comments

No, not THAT kind of quickie ::frown::. I spent all evening doing all the show prep stuff that I know not to put off until the last minute but do so any­way. I always end up clean­ing the last batch of beads on the last night, and then they have to be sorted, culled, placed into sets, inven­to­ried, placed into the right place in the dis­play boxes. Every­thing has to be fit into as few boxes and totes as fea­si­ble, and then even­tu­ally put into the car. Oops? Did I say put into the car? That didn’t get done yet. It may wait until morning.

Heck, I’m not even sure what I’m going to wear tomor­row! I just know that I bet­ter be at the Cobb Gal­le­ria by 8 a.m. ready to unpack and set up because the doors open at 10, and we HOPE there will be lots of cus­tomers look­ing for unique hand­made hol­i­day gifts…

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