Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Here We Grow Again!

These two gals are the same… but different. The Mae on the left has arms and legs sewn by me on my little sewing machine and her face is hand embroidered. The Mae on the right has arms and legs sewn automatically by a professional machine and her face is machine embroidered. Yep! This little sweetie is high tech! lol

Rob and I have mentioned in past blog and Facebook posts that 2011 would be a big year with announcements planned for almost every month.  Well, this is another one - and maybe the most exciting announcement of the year (but the year's not over yet - <insert tease here>) Thanks to all of you, Bit of Whimsy Dolls has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last year. Growth is great! Keeping up with growth can sometimes be a struggle as we've watched dolls fly off the virtual shelves on our New Doll Thursdays. We simply can't keep the same old pace and meet the demand for Original Bit of Whimsy Dolls.  This is a great problem to have, but still a problem. 

Rob and I have spent a lot of time talking about how to scale to meet your demand for my dolls.  To help ease this pressure, I hired an assistant full time who helps me with cutting dolls, stuffing the arms and legs, shipping and listing items on my website. She is fantastic and helps me out tremendously. She doesn't sew. Much. Yet. lol I put an ad in the newspaper and interviewed several sewists… I was amazed at how many people did not take me seriously with one even going so far as to tell me "…I feel that your dolls and patterns are too simplified for my skill level… I am sure many other mediocre sewers responded to your ad.  I wish you luck with your adventure."  No Joke… she actually put this in an email. lol. We live in a very old community and most of the ladies that I talked to didn't think that you could run an international business from your dining room. I did hire someone but after a few weeks I came to the realization that we weren't a good fit. I am very passionate and I need someone just as interested and passionate as I am!  I put hiring on the back burner since we had a lot of traveling this spring and it would be hard to train anyone until we got home.

While on vacation in Georgia, we happened to visit A Scarlet Thread, an amazing fabric shop owned by an amazing woman named Karen. We got to talking…as Southern women do… and she gave us some great ideas to help us boost production. She introduced us to a great machine and talked to us about software capabilities that will duplicate my designs on the machine. We didn't buy a machine at that time, but Rob and I talked about it. A lot. Should we make such an investment?  Would it work? Would the quality that I demand be there?  We often seek advice from S.C.O.R.E. when faced with business turning points and after we talked to them about this machine, they asked us why we hadn't bought it yet. We bought it that day! It now sits in our dining room / Bit of Whimsy Dolls world headquarters lol.

In the past, I have looked into machine embroidery and have never liked it. There has always been something about it that I didn't like. Maybe it was how "perfect" it is or maybe it is the type of stitches that are used but I never liked it. I was really, really, REALLY nervous about the idea of switching to machine embroidered faces. I was not nervous about having the machine sew arms and legs for me, however! lol But the faces…. the faces need to be "just right". We contacted a few people to do the programming since we knew nothing about the software and designing, etc. We were excited to just get the machine going! We didn't like the designs that were coming back to us so Rob decided to give the software a go being the computer tech geek he is. I couldn't believe it when he showed me a sample of my hand drawn face sewn by a machine! Wow! The first one wasn't perfect, but showed a lot of promise.  After countless tweaks - add a stitch here, move this stitch over a little, yada yada - he nailed it!  I have to give Rob props for digging into this software and figuring things out! So even though the new dolls will be "high tech", they keep their handmade charm by still being directly based on my drawings. I honestly never thought it was possible until I saw a group of Mae's sitting together! For the next several months, there will be a mix of dolls with hand embroidered faces and machine embroidered faces and the descriptions will say what type of doll it is until we have moved completely over to machine embroidery.

So what does this mean for you? It means that I can provide more dolls for you! Wooohooooo! It means that I can keep my costs down while still providing an awesome product! Oh yeah baby! It means that I will have more time for custom orders! Yes! All custom orders will still have hand embroidered faces and the next three spots will open on Friday May 20th at 3pm Eastern!

Thank you to everyone who has supported us over the years! This has been an amazing journey so far and Rob and I are thrilled about this next path!

16 comments:

  1. Big congratulations to you both! Exciting things for you, your dining room & your international business! ;) I'll be at my computer on the 20th!

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  2. Congratulations! That is awesome guys!

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  3. Wonderful! :) Congrats! I've loved watching your business grow, very encouraging for other mom-preneurs!

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  4. How amazing- who knew that a machine could make such sweet faces!! That is so cool! And kudos to Rob for getting it done- that is huge too! This will be a wonderful thing for you, I am sure! What a fabulous way to expand and build, and make so many people happy in the process :)

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  5. Good for you... but the attraction to your dolls is the fact that they are hand made, with their own charm, characteristics, and uniqueness, which is what is achieved by the hand stitching... Isnt this just heading towards them being manufactured??

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  6. Sorry, I agree with anonymous.

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  7. I knew when I made this announcement, not everyone would be excited about it. I know that there are members of the handmade community that see any type of automation as a bad thing. I understand that… I totally get it. But I also know that if I am going to grow anymore that I need to change some things. I cannot do everything that I need to do and do everything that I want to do if I continue to make everything by hand myself. It just isn't possible. While I know that a machine cannot replicate handmade, I am very happy with the results and Mae still looks like Mae and not like a doll off of the shelf at a toy store. They are still assembled by hand so there will be variations in face and hair placement and each doll will still be one of a kind. I actually chose to go this route because it would mean that I wouldn't have to look into manufacturing 100s of identical Mae's that would be stamped out completely by machine with no input from me whatsoever. I would hope that the strength of my original designs plays a bigger part in the love that people have for my dolls than the fact that they are completely handmade. I would feel this way whether I was embroidering everything by hand or not. I honestly feel that the overall design "speaks" to people more than anything else. I think that if this were not the case, I wouldn't sell as many patterns as I do. I believe in handmade but I also believe that handmade can grow into something bigger. If I had a magic answer to make everyone happy, believe me, I would be doing it! lol Thanks for the honest input. :)

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  8. The dolls are still handmade. You still cut them out, stuff them, and sew them together yourself. The only thing done one the machine is the face and sewing the arms on. It's still done by YOU. Besides, a sewing machine, is after all, a machine--and so is the embroidery machine. Both use one operator--which is YOU. You don't have an assembly line in a factory with 50 workers--there's still just YOU. So, IMO, even tho you're using a different machine to make the faces and sew on the arms, they are still handmade. And I'm truly excited for you, Sarah!! You inspire me so much!

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  9. Good for you!! I am very excited for you and if I had lived near you, I would have totally been your sewing assistant :)

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  10. Ooh! The possibilities! I'm thinking doll kits with the pre-embroidered faces. Sort of like Build-a-bear!

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  11. Have you thought of making the embroidery file available for sale? I always feel like I mess the dolls up when I get to their faces. Hand-sewing is so not my thing! I'd love to set my embroidery machine up and get a perfect face every time.
    ~Jenny~

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  12. Welcome to the wonderfull world of machine embroidery, I am hooked to it. Love making in the hoop projects like dolls. I would love to buy the computerized files. I always say my sewing machine can't sew straight LOL and hand embroidery is not my thing. I hope you will make the files available for sale because this will also give you another group of customers. I saw your designs at YouCanMakeThis.com and the have also an machine embroidery site SWAKembroidery.com Your designs will be a big hit, I am sure of it.

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  13. I love your dolls, so I'm happy to hear that things are going so well for you.

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  14. I recently became a fan when someone asked me to sew a BOW doll from a pattern she had purchased. All your dolls are so cute. It is inspiring to hear how your business has grown. Wish I was closer as I would love to be your sewing assistant.

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  15. I was wondering if you would be willing to share the name of the machine and software you discovered. Congratulations on the growth of your company.

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