Daughters

I came home from walking our dog the other day and this was waiting for me.  My daughter made it just for me.  Not only is the coolest handbag anyone could possibly want, she scented it for me.  So not only will I look awesome, I'll smell so good too.  I hope you all have have a lovely Mother's Day and that you're lucky enough to have someone like my daughter in your life.

Crazy Days

 

So how have your past few days been.  Crazy right?  With the capture and killing of America's no. 1 most wanted to the pomp and circumstance of the royal wedding.  Hopefully you'll have time to put it all in perspective.  In the meantime I thought I would share a bit of our spring break.  We had the opportunity to go to Palm Springs, which is located in the desert due east from our home in Pacific Palisades. It's known for it's amazing mid century architecture, and I wasn't disappointed. 

 

While there we check out Joshusa Tree National Park  Have you been there?  It's like landing on a foreign planet.  Rocks everywhere, and not just any kind of rock, huge rocks that are beautiful and round and ever so inviting to climb.  Photo above is the park while we were standing on a rather large rock.  My husband likes to boulder, that's him with the huge pad on his back.

Want to go and experience Palm Spring in style?  Check out this rental and you can stay in Frank Sinatra's pad for a mere $2600 a night.  But then you do get to rest your head in the same house as Frank.

Too much stuff

The past few weeks have flown out of control out the door.  We've been busy working on our new site, which has had one thing after another go wrong?  Not quite the word but not go well.  Working out the kinks has been complicated.  Too much time waiting for someone to get back to me about one bug then another in the system.  At any rate that is enough complaining.  It's just about done and I hope it will be worth all the work.  In the meantime as I sit here waiting for some one to get back to me I found this great article about a fashion show for dogs, put on by FIT students.

Queen of Egypt

 

Read anything good lately?  I just finished Cleopatra by Stacy Scheiff.  Did you know she died before her 40th birthday and her only husband was her younger brother?  She had children with Cesar and Mark Antony.  She was amazing and powerful and the Roman's were terrified of her.   The book while not a page turning was really interesting to read and really very timely with all the events in North Africa today.

Old Bess

We've been in LA for a bit over a year now.  Hard to believe how fast that went.  When we decided to move here we made a very a very conscious decision that we would try and live with one car.  One car as far as I was concerned was one car too many.  I love the freedom of public transportation, but I've managed to live in places with awesome public transit, NY and Paris and passable transit, San Francisco and Minneapolis.  LA doesn't begin to have barely passable public transit and I live too far from my studio to walk.  Eventually I'll move my studio a bit closer to home in the meantime my husband is pretty tired of biking to work in the rain. 

The car hunt is on.  The second car hunt.  We've had Old Bess for 10 years and love her.  She's a fabulous VW Jetta, fun to drive and oh so zippy.  Best thing is that we own her.  The thought of another car payment isn't a happy thought.  I'd rather go on a fabulous vacation.  With 2 children and a dog, the were kind out growing the Jetta.  As I tell my husband the children won't be shorter next year.  Here's what we're thinking about;

or

but what I really want is this;

Isn't it cute?  We saw these cute little Fiats while we were living in Paris and I feel in love with them best thing is they are actually making their way across the Atlantic next year.  My favorite has a cream exterior and two tone red and cream interior.

The Saga Continues

Getting ready for the show includes so many factors from the booth design to the all important product and back to our website.  We've had our current website since the store opened in '06 and while we've changed the look and added new products over the years, the guts behind the store has remained the same.

A lot has changed since '06.  A crazy amount has changed and while I've never been unhappy with the cart system I currently have it does lack a bit of flexibility.  A major issue has been managing our wholesale customers.  We never really developed a system for it since it was never a focus for the business.  Well NYIGF will change that, at least that is the hope.  Don't get me wrong our retail customers are still and will always be incredibly important, we just want to add wholesalers into the picture.  So for the past 2 weeks I have been looking at every major cart out there, and I mean looking and developing stores withing the trial versions.  I tried; BigCommerce, Volusion, and AmeriCommerce. Just to name a few.  I finally settled on Pinnacle.  Why?  It has all the shinny new stuff I want like, wholesale customer options, access to design code, mobile store integration, just to name a few.  So far it's heads and shoulders above the others in terms of designing the store.  I'm not a web designer and don't really want to have to pay someone every time I want to change a photo on my site, so it's really important that it's easy for me to do and not too time consuming.

The new store will be open by the 22nd and will have the glasses pictured above for sale, at last!  Fingers crossed anyway.  May be some bumps in the road between now and then.  We'll keep you posted.

The Application Part Deux

 

The application went in the mail yesterday.  We found out that all new applicants generally are referred to the "Newest" division of the show, so we're not holding our breath for a spot in Accent. But wish us luck anyway!  The photo above is our application.  We had to include photos of our work, booth design and a bunch of written material.  We gave a lot of thought as to how it would arrive in NY and how we would make it stand out against all the envelopes.  They were very specific about the package not being over-sized or containing any actual samples.  We thought a flat box sectioned off might do the trick.  Have you noticed our revamped logo?  I'm pretty pleased with it.

 

Since we've not done a show for this line we had to design a booth for the product.  Our concept is a birch grove just after the sun as set.  The booth will be dark, hopefully playing up the white plates, a bit romantic, which we feel reflects the product.  We'll have trees in the booth and display product on the trees.  You get to watch us build those trees this summer.