Mine! All mine I tell you

I had coffee with a former coworker last week. He's got this great combination of creative and business experience that I found really helpful in terms of the bracelet thing. Especially the sales and marketing stuff. My dad was a salesperson, and I joke that I'm still permanently scarred (or so I like to think) from being forced to go door to door as a 5 year old to sell, of all things, packets of garden seeds. I didn't get it, or didn't have it, or something. Anyway, sales has never been my thing, so I'm impressed when I talk to people who do it well (i.e. in a way that doesn't feel slick or manipulative).

When I told him I wanted to name my little enterprise Physaria, after the name of the plant I studied in school, he was nice about it, but kind of said, "Wha?" Hard to spell, doesn't mean anything to most people. Ouch. But it did get me thinking about what else I could call it. I don't want to be restricted to bracelets, but it does feel like the polymer clay is something that I want to continue to explore. ("explore" - Ha! That sounds so artsy.)

And somehow, I started worrying a little about getting a domain name in case I ever want to sell things online outside of Etsy. Dreaming big, I guess. So I thought about it, and thought some more. And didn't come up with anything. Then, it was like a name was delivered to me. I can't remember the process of getting it, it was like it just popped into my head. Sent by muse, special delivery. Thanks, muse!

The name I came up with is Stamped Clay Designs. I went to a site and purchased the name as a dot com, and it's mine. All mine! Easy as laying down some money for it. The site had all sorts of other services in terms of email and web hosting, but I'm very far away from that at this point, so will just keep those in mind for future reference.

The other thing this friend did for me was to help with packaging. We originally met because he worked as a sales rep for a paper company, and I worked for a company that made artsy rubber stamps and we printed a bunch of stuff. He was able to get me some samples of really nice cover stock that will make the button cards look very professional. I hadn't really thought about that end of it. I was more concerned with what to print on the cards.

I hope to make progress on both the button cards and photographing stuff. I've got bunches of buttons that I need to photograph. Chicken and egg, but there will be time to work on it this weekend.