31 Days of Decorating with Junk: Owning a Junky Business Part 3

Today’s post will focus on record keeping, branding, and advertising.

1. What kind of records do you keep?
I keep sales receipts and pay sales tax.
I keep terrible records of my expenses and inventory purchases. I need to work on that. Like, a lot.

2. Does your blog and fb bring you noticeable business?
Facebook DEFINITELY brings me business. When I use ads on facebook, I target a local audience, and that helps a lot.
I’m not sure that my blog has brought me a lot of business. I know there are local people who follow it, though, so I guess it has probably made a difference.

3. BRANDING

I made up this question because I want to talk about it.
Because The HomeShed is located in the middle of about 20 other junk shops, I knew from the start that I wanted to have a great name, clear logo, and “reminders” of my business wherever people go.
I made price tags that have my logo and contact information on them. I just print them on cardstock, cut them, hole punch them and tie a string. It is more work than just putting a sticker on things, but it’s worth it. Many antique stores/dealers cut off the price tags after a sale and keep them for records. I do not. I like to send my customers home with the logo and contact info. If I ever change this method, for a show or event where I don’t have time to write out receipts every time, then I will probably include two tags. One price tag to cut off and one tag with my logo and contact info.
I also made stickers to put on our receipts as another reminder to customers of where they’ve been and the great things they found!

4. Credit cards
I use Square to accept credit cards. It has worked pretty well. Sometimes the scanner is touchy, but overall it’s a pretty slick system.

5. Advertising
We advertise a bit on facebook, and usually place a garage sale ad and multiple craigslist ads before our sales. We also rely on our location a lot – We put signs out early in the week that say “Open This Weekend.” So many of our customers drive by regularly that this is a good reminder for them.

6. Other things I want to talk about:

Ya gotta have help. I am a creative soul, who sometimes has trouble prioritizing things and getting projects from the idea phase to completion. Red Granite Farm’s Nicole keeps me moving. Our partnership is crucial to The HomeShed’s success.
Furniture doesn’t sell as quickly as you’d like to think. Blogs and facebook make it seem as though painted furniture sells just as fast as we can crank it out. But that’s not true, at least not for me. And then you’re stuck with a lot of furniture!
It takes a lot of room. Room for inventory, room to work on projects, room to store projects in waiting…
Keep good records from the get-go. I’m still working on that.

I’ve got one more post about The HomeShed in the works…stay tuned!
This post is part of 31 Days of Decorating with Junk: Vintage, Antique and Unique for your Home and Garden.