Year End Fun with Charts

While I get to look at this data all the time, I thought some of you might want a peek at it.  It helps me appreciate the amount of orders, traffic, and time that NightBlooming demands.  It also makes me happy to see it grow.

Yearly Item Charts

These charts show the percentages of the types of items I sell.  The early ones aren't very accurate because I was new to this sort of recordkeeping (who am I kidding, it was solo sticks, pairs of sticks and "everything else.")  When I got to about 2010 my best friend started doing my books (she's paid in a blend of time and whatever she wants from the store) because she's some sort of wizard in Excel and I'm likely to poke my eye out with my own dunce cap.  I'm good at a lot, but data entry and numbers in tiny cells are not part of those things. 

NightBlooming started out stocked mostly just with hair sticks and other types of jewelry.  In 2008 Panacea's Hair Salve and Triple Moon Oil were introduced. 

 Ostara's Salve (then Vegan/Summer Salve) and Freya's (then Winter Salve) came along in 2010.  For awhile there, most of what I sold was hair sticks, and then salves edged them out to be my most commonly purchased item.

And then the hair colors happened.

We've offered Faerie Dust as far back as 2008, it was actually one of our first products.  Faerie Dust is a blend of the non-henna/cassia herbs used in most our hair colors, and I offered it for sale with the idea that people who mixed their own henna might just want the additional herbs.  It didn't really take off, but did well enough that I kept it around.  Along those same lines, I've offered custom blended hair colors as far back as 2009.  

Devas and Rusalki were the first totally stand alone pre-blended herbal hair colors I offered (starting in 2009).  I didn't work up the guts to offer Genasi (2012), Kitsune (2012), or Enyo (2014) for a long time because I was afraid of someone not reading and using henna, then finding out it didn't come out, and accuse me of ruining their hair.  So far *knock on wood* that hasn't happened.

What really set the hair colors on fire, though, was changing the leading images from packets of herbs to what you see today.  The sample colors and color charts on the first slide are really what  both got people's attention, and gave them more confidence to try.  And that's why, in 2014, herbal hair colors finally unseated hair salves as my most sold product. 

But by that same token, as other orders increased, the amount of time I've had for making other things dropped. Sticks had suffered the worst, taking an additional blow in 2014 as our Ficcare mods became much more in demand. 

Favorites 

You can see some of this same data reflected in this listing of the top 10 favorited items in the shop for 2014. 

Only one hair toy made the list (the TARDIS stick), the Salve Trinity Sampler barely hung on, and our Moondust Dry Shampoo managed to make a nice showing. The remaining 7 of the top 10 favorited items were all hair colors.

Where are these orders coming from?

This first map shows orders. While the majority of my orders are domestic, we do a LOT of international business, with Germany beating out everyone else by a substantial margin.  The second map shows views (both general site and item-specific combined), and it's awesome to see so many people finding their way to NightBlooming from every corner of the world!

Here's one more way to look at our orders, by month:

I was doing pretty good, keeping up with all the herbal stuff and sticks and Ficcares and salve and custom orders, and blogging and new packaging and and and... I kind of burned out :(

So while I did more orders than ever this year, I couldn't keep up the pace.  I'll try a little harder next year; if I could have kept up the pace I had at the first half the year, I could have closed out even better than I did.

What's coming in 2015?

I've got a pretty aggressive wish list of things I'd like to do in the coming year.  Firstly, I'd like to finish the Henna & Herbal Hair Coloring E-Book I've been working on for a good while now.  It's, I'm proud to say, the most comprehensive thing on herbal hair coloring I've ever seen.  It covers everything from sedr to senna to henna, essential oils, additives, and a million how-tos from mixing, to strand testing, to application.  It'll have amazing things like a pictoral how-to showing how to tell pure henna and herbal colors apart from chemical-laced henna compounds. It will show new henna users what dye release looks like and give them a step-by-step guide on application, rinsing, and after care. Right now it's about 52 pages and has well over 100 color images, the vast majority of them shot in my own little light studio to show exactly what I want.  Here's a few sample pages to give you an idea of what you can expect:

I imagine it'll be 20 or so pages longer by the end, with even MORE images. This one is my big priority and I'm itching to wrap it up and publish it. 

With the addition of bees to NightBlooming we've got fresh, clean, amazing beeswax on hand now.  We're planning on launching lip balm and also a Panacea's Salve-Scented solid perfume.

After that?  I'd love to launch brown hair colors.  I currently do them on a custom order only basis, but having them stocked as a general set of colors like Genasi and the others would be great.  It's also a massive undertaking, and if I was worried about people thinking henna ruined their hair, I'm terrified of what they'll say about indigo.  Doing them on a per-order basis helps me manage their expectations and limitations of the colors.

I also have dreams of a Frequent Customer Rewards program, but have yet to find a way that I can do it without crippling amounts of bokeeping on the back end :(

So that's where we're at!  I'd love to hear what you're looking forward most from NightBlooming in 2015!

Primavera Ficcare Update 2: Epoxy Sculpt

I remembered I had this amazing compound laying around (my craft room closet is an immense horde of random things), and I decided to see if I could use this epoxy-based sculpture mix I have to make the patterned top for a Primavera clip.

After some elbow grease, I'd managed to clean most the Ice Resin off my poor battered test clip, and got out the mold and mold release.  There's still a thin, thin layer of Ice Resin in some parts of the mold, so I knew I'd have to sit down and spend forever picking that out for any real work.  But for this I was just looking for a general test to see if the pattern would work and if the epoxy sculpture mix would hold to a clip.

Here we are all set up with the clip, the mold and a mold-releasing compound:

The first thing I did was mix up a little bit of the compound and press it into one of the cleaner parts of the mold to see what sort of pattern I got.  Not too bad.

The I rolled some out and pressed it into the mold:

Then pressed the Ficcare into that.  The modling compound is cool in that it acts like a clay, but sticks and cures like an epoxy.  If this worked, it'd self-adhere to the metal clip.

And after it'd cured for a few hours I popped it out:

The bad news is that it wasn't quite centered and wound up being a little shorter at the top because the clip shifted.  Rather than stop the test, I pulled off the coating with the intent to transfer it to an Avian clip to finish up the plans for making it silver and seeing how the finish goes:

That's another test clip on the left, I was practicing Violet marbling for a faux border, but since it wasn't centered, I'm just covering it up with the Primavera test.

That mostly worked, but I had to cut off the silver bits that stuck out the top with my Dremel

And then I let it dry:

The pattern got a little muddy with me screwing with it so much, but its promising.  After this I cleaned up the edges, filling in the gaps and then sanding them smooth.

The next step is to primer and apply silver leaf and see how the finishing process goes.

Primavera Ficcare Update

So close and yet, so far.  This time I tried pouring the Ice Resin into the mold, then after it had set up a bit, putting the Ficcare atop of it. 

The problem is that the curves of a blank Ficcare and a Primavera aren't the same.  So there were gaps in the finish.   What did take, however, looks lovely.

Now I just have to figure out how to get it off so I can try it again. Mind you I'm not sure how to fix this (which is why I've been a little stalled on this), but there hast to be a way. 

ETA:  I have an idea.  And I'll have another update soon.  If I have no willpower and take off this afternoon to try, it might be REALLY soon. 

Black Friday/Cyber Monday Special Offers

Giving Thanks

I would first like to give all of my customers my deepest thanks.  This has been a crazy year with more sales than ever, new products (and more to come!), and the addition of honey bees.  NightBlooming was started, and is still here, because you continue to support this one crazy longhair in her endeavors.

This little shop means the world to me and I cannot thank you all enough for the support, the kind notes I get with orders, and the random convos telling me how thrilled you are with your purchases. 

I do this because it makes me happy to make you happy. <3

Special Offers

We have fantastic pricing on some special items, all posted as featured in the shop. These items will return to their normal pricing at 12am Tuesday Central time, so get them while you can!

The samples that are up are perfect stocking stuffers for the hair-lovers in your life :)  If you're participating in a Christmas Swap / Secret Santa, these are fantastic additions for anyone!

Go to the listing!

Go to the listing!

Go to the listing!

Go to the listing!

Winter Bees

Winter Bees

It's been a busy fall (it always is).  There's herbs to collect, a billion leaves to rank and turn into leaf mulch, a garden to pull out, and now, bees to prepare for winter.  The bees are all settled in.  We've given the apiaries insulating roofs and insulation panels to help keep them warm. Inside, the bees will form a tight cluster around the queen, shivering their wing muscles to keep one another warm.  Think of how penguins in the Antarctic form one large group, taking turns on the outside and then moving back into the group to warm up.  Bees do something similar, and this cluster moves slowly through the hive in the winter, the bees on the outside of the cluster picking up honey and feeding it inwards.

They'll be dormant probably until sometime in April, and I worry.  I know people in Alaska keep bees, but still, the winters are very cold and long.  Hopefully they'll be okay!

We also acquired a new honey jar for the house.  It's small, which is awesome as I try to use it sparingly, but also fits perfectly in the pantry.

The reviews on it often complain about it being messy, but I haven't had an issue with it.  I just let the honey drizzle back into the jar until it stops for a second, then move the wand over the lip of the jar. 

Ficcare Update

I've got updates on the Primavara Project coming, so sit tight :)  It's just been super-busy, but I'm plugging away!