On a practical level, I am at the bottom of the bottle of my favorite, long-discontinued blackberry single note, & have yet to find a replacement that makes me remotely happy. On a more important level, though, some of you have reached out about the name itself, & it's my responsibility as a creator to listen & adjust.

Every one of us carries nostalgic, romantic, deeply emotional connections to words, terms, names, & phrases. Part of a shared culture is the joint understanding of a fragment of language as conveying so much more than its literal meaning. This is social shorthand, & I lean on it a lot in my scent names & descriptions to transport you into the worlds I've created in my mind. It is powerful & delicious & a key part of the magic.

But our shared culture isn't the only culture, & it's certainly not the trump card in a non existent game of who-gets-to-say.

When I'm doing scent development, I make a point of doing some creative Googling to see what associations surface in connection with my going concepts. I'm looking for several red flags: the potential to step on another indie maker's existing work; copyright constraints & Big Beauty affiliation; & any obvious connections to fascism, racism, bigotry, or related bullshit. I also look deeper, for more nuanced concerns of exoticism, imperialism, appropriation, & other Why-Are-White-People shenanigans. Writing it out looks pretty daunting, but while it's definitely work, it's not difficult to take a moment to do some cultural vetting before I release a new scent.

Even with this work, I sometimes miss a critical association when researching a blend for launch; Sleepy Lagoon is a prime example, & I am grateful to the PBSW community for alerting me to the term's weighted and deadly meaning to the Latinx community in Los Angeles.

But sometimes, blends have been part of the PBSW wallpaper for so long, I don't see them through a critical lens, & I miss a really blatant & obvious offense.

The term Indian summer is so deep in my Anglophile vernacular, & conjures such vivid and welcome associations, that I have worked with it in my catalog for over a decade without seeing it for what it arguably is: an offensive term rooted in anti-Native American racism. It is the season that gives way to cooler temperatures, only to take it back, like the "untrustworthy Indian" stereotype that pervades both outdated frontier American narratives & modern policy discourse on Native tribal sovereignty.

I am deeply thankful to the PBSW fans who called me to task on perpetuating this slur, for their work to demonstrate the harm done by this & similar terms, & for their confidence in my ability to see & correct my mistake. And I'm thankful for you, for reading this & for taking a moment to consider how anti-Native American bias & appropriation exists and thrives in white spaces, particularly in the creative & witchcraft/occult/New Age communities, & how we can work to dismantle it.

The long & the short of it is this:

No, there will be no gobsmackingly huge Black Friday discounts, sales, or coupon codes at PBSW. There never are.

If you haven't clicked away yet, thank you :) Let me explain.

One of my biggest goals with PBSW is to provide quality, unique products at reasonable prices, every day. Not when there's a sale on, not when you find a promo code, not on special discount days. EVERY day. There are few things more frustrating than buying an item, only to find out two days later that I could have paid less had I waited. I don't want you all to spend your time stalking my shop for sales & discounts - life's too short for that nonsense. 

I set my prices to ensure that I am covering my materials & expenses, paying myself a living wage, & setting aside a little money for quarterly taxes/product development/expansion. I don't charge more than that, even when I could. At the end of the day, I love & respect my customers, & inflating my everyday prices just so I can offer discounts feels disingenuous at best. 

Finally, Black Friday sales hurt micro businesses & makers. Offering deep discounts & free shipping directly impacts my ability to provide for my family, as it does for most of the makers I know. When we provide free shipping, we pay for postage out of our own pockets. When we discount our items, we don't get paid for the time it took to make them. We totally understand that the holidays are an expensive time - they are just as expensive for us. Know that I do my best to give you lots of options so that your gift giving budget can go the distance.

So, there it is. When you buy handmade, you buy from a real live person who sat down & made the thing you now hold in your hands. Help us to keep making awesome stuff for you, & leave the door buster deals to the big box corporations <3

Because I am a big softy, I will be lowering the free domestic shipping threshold to $50 for the rest of the holiday season to help you out. 

Black Friday I urge everyone to #OptOutside instead of getting caught up in the shopping madness. Instead of standing in line at 4 am, go climb a hill & watch the sun rise & spend time with your favorite people.

Next week heralds my favorite November tradition, #GivingTuesday. I donate 100% of the day's profits to ShelterBoxUSA.org, providing emergency shelter & vital supplies to families displaced by humanitarian crises & natural disasters the world over. Last year, we donated $300 - let's smash that goal for 2020!

Thanks for reading, & here's to a happy & healthy holiday season <3

One of the absolute best perks of MakerLife(tm) is getting to meet other amazing Makers, & one of my favorite is the incandescent Lucy Bellwood, adventure cartoonist, part time Muppet, & overall spectacular human being.

Lucy & I sat down for a real & rambling chat a few weeks ago about Benedictine labor, code switching, from-not-of syndrome, & a whole lot more

CW: there are sweary words used, & our second half gets really personal, including pregnancy & abortion, so listen at your discretion.

Well, kids, here it is, the day I hit 20 THOUSAND sales in my Etsy shop!

What.

The.

HECK.

When I opened my shop 5 1/2 years ago, I never expected to sell more than a few bars of soap, let alone quit my day job & build an empire. But, thanks to some major ass-busting on my part & a community of incredible customers, here I am, sitting pretty at over 20K sales.

I get asked a LOT about my growth on Etsy, & what new sellers can do to really nail that kind of success for themselves. The truth is, there’s no one recipe for success, & there’s no map I can draw that will lead every maker to the same peak, as it were. But, with this post, I’ll try to distill some Best Practices that will hopefully demystify things a bit, & help you get your business on the right path.

Disclaimer: I am a college drop out. I have absolutely ZERO formal training or education in business. I don’t know what a supply chain is, let alone how to use one. If your dream is to get on Shark Tank/find investors/go public/build a brand that you can sell & make big bucks, this information is very much not going to help you. I don’t think. But maybe it will? I don’t know.

Make What You Love to Make

Rule #1 of building a micro business – you are going to be living, breathing, & completely saturating yourself in the thing that you make, so be damn sure it’s something you really, really love. Don’t start a business making Shrinky-Dink eye patches unless you are 100% OK with them taking over your entire existence.

Loving what you make also pushes you to get better at what you make. Your main push to make a thing shouldn’t be “because it’s easy”. One of the most soul crushing things I can hear from a maker is “Oh my gosh, these are so easy to make, I can just crank them out & I don’t even have to think about it!”…

I am a firm believer in hard work. Work makes us better human beings. Work adds value, to things, to life, to ourselves. Making a thing that challenges your abilities & forces you to learn, adapt & grow has inherent worth, long before you put a price sticker on it.

Skill: it’s the new sexy.

I busted my ass for years in the food service industry, & then busted my ass in client services for a while. When I started making soap as a hobby, I pushed myself to learn as much as I could about it. Then I busted my ass some more. Noticing a trend?

Working really hard to get better at something makes you work smarter, too. You learn how to make things more efficiently, how to finesse your materials to do things that they normally don’t want to do. You get stupidly excited when you find a new way to do something that shouldn’t work, but totally does. You cackle giddily at no one.

Being passionate about what you do also makes it really easy to talk about your work, and talking about what you do is the fastest way to get to the next point…

Connect With People

Hiding yourself away in an airy, south facing studio at the top of the house & doing nothing but making felt nose cozies all day sounds like heaven, but at some point, if you want to pay the bills, you’ll actually have to talk to people.

Yeah. I know. You hate shilling. You hate “sales”. Your personal idea of hell is having to stand up in front of a room full of people & give a sales pitch about your nose cozies & why everyone needs one & why yours are the best & oh my GOD PLEASE BUY ONE, WON’T SOMEBODY BUY ONE.

The truth is, as micro businesses, sales pitches & elevator speeches aren’t what net us customers. What does?

Relationships.

I’m not talking about relationships with your family, or your besties, or even the regulars that you see every week at the dog park. Honestly, these folks are probably the worst group to pitch to, as they’ll tend to give very well-intentioned but really horrible business advice (see supply chains).

You want to start looking for other makers, other micro businesses, other people who value skill & substance over 3-for-$5 deals. Chat up the regulars at the local yarn shop. Get comfy in an online forum dedicated to indie beauty products. Trade contact info with the guy doing hand crafted furniture at the arts festival. Talk to anyone who will listen about what you do, why you do it, & why you love it. Hang onto the folks who talk back, & for the love of Pete, ALWAYS have business cards in your pocket.

Go out into the world (IRL or online) & sow the seeds of relationships, leaving a trail that people can follow back to you & your work. People will remember that awesome girl that came by the shop a few weeks ago & talked about raising goats & making cheese. They will remember the guy who gave really good advice on how to set up a composting system, & didn’t he make concrete planters or something, I know he had a link in his profile…

Our work is nothing without people to share it with. You gotta get out of your own head & find your people. Find the ones who Get You, who get what you do & what you’re all about. And then…

Listen to People (but not all of them)

It’s all well and good if you love to make wire sculptures of Jeff Bridges, but if no one wants to buy a wire replica of His Dudeness, well, you’ll have a hard time paying the bills.

Now, you can go all infomercial & try to figure out a way to convince folks that their lives are incomplete without a life-size 10-gauge aluminum Lebowski in their front yard… eeeeeh. This just sounds exhausting. And absolutely no fun whatsoever.

Or, you use the budding network of connections you’ve been cultivating to find something that people do want. Play around with your materials & your skills. Make some prototypes & put them up on Instagram & see what catches people’s attention. Invite some local makers around for a beer & to talk shop & show them what you’re working on. Ask people what they are missing, what they need, what they are always looking for but can’t find.

Now, you’ll probably get a lot of feedback. Some of it will be really helpful. Some of it will be awful. There’s always someone who thinks that crocheted doggie bikinis is A Sure Thing, and yeah, the Poo-pouri folks are making a mint right now, but really, is that what you want to spend your time making? (If it is, get on with your bad self, you are a better person than I.)

Weed out the impractical, the also-rans, the ideas that run contrary to your personal standards, and look for the genuine seeds of inspiration. Look for the ideas that speak to a larger audience. Look for the sparks that make you say, “You know what? I could do something with that…” & that keep you up at night with your brain on overdrive.

Fill. A. Need.

Even if it’s a tiny need. Even if it’s a frivolous need. Find that spot where your skill & an empty space intersect. Take a thing that works okay & figure out a way to make it work better. Make something that’s already really useful really beautiful as well.

Let’s be frank: there are a metric shit ton of makers out there. If you’re going to make yourself stand out in a crowded marketplace, you need to come up with a really good reason why people should buy your stuff. “Because I worked really hard on it,” isn’t enough; people will not buy from you just because you spent fifteen hours hand painting a Scrabble tile to look like a Cheez-It. A pity purchase isn’t how you net loyal customers.

This isn’t to say that you can’t succeed unless you literally reinvent the wheel. You just need to figure out how you could make it just a little bit better.

Pay Yourself

No, dammit, seriously, I mean it. Figure out what it costs to make one of your kimchi-stuffed marshmallows, from supplies & ingredients to packaging & printer ink. Then figure out how long it takes for you to make it, and add in an hourly wage for yourself. You are a maker, not a charity; if you want to quit that day job, you have to pay yourself.

More importantly, you have to value the work that you do before you can expect anyone else to value it.

If you don’t factor in labor when you price your items, your prices will be too low. Contrary to popular opinion, low prices do not net long term sales, not in the hand made world. Price your work cheaply, & people will assume that it’s cheap in quality, too.

There are a ton of pricing calculators out there, so I’m not holding your hand through that process. Just make sure at the end of the day, your work is working for you.

Be grateful

Here it is folks, the end game, benchmark, if-you-listen-to-nothing-else-I’ve-said-for-god’s-sake-listen-to-this moment.

Say thank you. Say it A LOT. Thank your customers. Thank your suppliers. Thank your connections. Thank your detractors.

And then thank your customers again.

Never let your customers think for one hot minute that you take their support for granted.

Invite them into your work space; host open houses, post in-process pictures, share disaster stories, let them see you doing what you do best.

Give them something; get super pretty business cards to put in each order, make a coupon code just for returning customers, send freebies, make a behind-the-scenes video.

Let them know you’re listening; answer emails & convos, send a hand-written note, maintain an active Facebook page/Twitter/Instagram that lets your customers talk to you in public.

Our customers are why we get to do what we do all day; without them, we’d be stuck in uninspiring day jobs, getting flack & making money for other people. Our customers set us free. Never forget that.

***

So yeah, you probably thought this was going to be a post all about getting found in Etsy searches & how to tag your products… Whoops.