NightBlooming turns NINE today!

NightBlooming turns NINE today! What an immensely crazy thought that is.  Nine years ago I still hadn't landed a full time job out of college, wasn't married to my amazing husband, did not have our house (with dedicated NightBlooming craft room), garden, or bees. NightBlooming was packed into a corner of an old Victorian house, under a pitched roof. My workspace was an old dining room table and some closet organizer from the hardware store.

It seems so, so long ago!

And yet I'm still here, and so are you!  As a thank you for my amazing customers, please enjoy a special 4-day sale.

Next year is going to be a massive milestone, and I'm already looking forward to what I can do for it.

Find the queen, win a 2oz Thriae!

This past weekend my husband and I split our surviving hive so we would again have two hives! That means we opened up one hive:

Inspected each comb to determine what was on each, and then divided them between the two hives.  The hive that doesn't have the queen will raise a new one, and the one that does doesn't need the youngest brood comb, which is what the queenless hive will raise a new queen from. Finding a queen bee is HARD.  Most times you will never, ever see her, but my eagle-eyed husband spotted her. This was awesome as it let us divide up the comb in an ideal way to best support the queenless hive.

So here's the deal: The queen bee is in this picture.

 If you find her, mark her (with Photoshop, MS paint, whatever),and send me the picture either by email or by Etsy convo through Wed, April 20th.  

I'll draw winners from the entries and will include a free 2 oz Thriae Scalp Scrub with your next order! 

Why April 20th? It's our 9-year anniversary and we'll have even more fun things then! Good luck!

NightBloomingGarden.com

You can now shop our natural and hair-friendly wares at www.nightbloominggarden.com , http://nightblooming.patternbyetsy.com ,  or www.etsy.com/shop/NightBlooming

You now have another great way to shop and purchase from NightBlooming! Today Etsy rolled out something called Pattern by Etsy.

What this allowed me to do was accomplish one of the Big Store Goals, which was a site that was not technically on etsy.com. So without further ado:

www.nightbloominggarden.com

So, why? Aren't you doing just fine with us on Etsy?

While all my current customers are obviously very Etsy-savvy, sometimes people don't get over that initial hurdle. "I don't have an Etsy account," is enough to turn people off because, seriously, if you don't already have an account someplace do you really want to register for one? This lets people skirt that hurdle, but still enjoy NightBlooming products.

Why this and not a homebrew site?

The main hangup with building my own site was not the building, but the amount of double-work involved. Etsy has made a lot of great improvements with stats, order tracking, and shipping labels. Having my own site would mean returning to doing all those things in a totally different way, and also maintaining inventory in a way that would track it across two sites. (Meaning if I had 25 packets of Genasi on hand, I'd have to track that and reduce it manually depending on how much sold on which site.)

For shipping labels, I'd have to print the orders made on Etsy one way, the ones on a stand-alone site another. If someone placed an order on one site, it wouldn't show in their order history on the other. With this method all my inventory, customer order tracking, shipping labels, and things that make my life much, much easier stays in one database.

There are some things that Pattern is lacking. It it still isn't easy for me to do customer rewards (I keep envisioning a buy 10 get 1 free on packets of herbal hair colors, for example), I don't get to control every aspect of my own branding, and I can't house my blog on the same site. But we'll figure out customer rewards yet, and the rest of the trade-offs are manageable.

 Give it a whirl! I'm eager to know about your experience.