So Barbara Walters misses a day and wow, meltdown on the view! I almost feel sorry for Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
Tutorials on soapmaking, bath fizzies, lotions and more
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
So Barbara Walters misses a day and wow, meltdown on the view! I almost feel sorry for Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
Filed Under: Bramble Berry News
Easter is almost here and I know your family is probably descending upon your house (not that I’m not thrilled and excited to see them!). For a fun afternoon activity, after all the children are in a post-sugar-induced-blank-stare-state and the adults are just thrilled that the furniture has lived to see another year sans chocolate hand prints, Bramble Berry has the most adorable kit for making Easter Soap.
For $30, you’ll have enough materials to make, package and label 8 – 10 bars of adorable Easter themed soap – and memories of fun creative family fun to last a lifetime.
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
Steak Soap anyone? The soap is scented with Cranberry fragrance and apparently was designed to match a meat-themed-bathroom. You would think I was kidding … but I’m not.
It’s a very cool example of creativity and thinking outside the proverbial, cliched box.
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
Apparently, archaeologists exploring Cypress have found the world’s oldest perfume factory. Spanning over 40,000 square feet and thought to employ over a dozen people, the factor even had its own oil pressing machinery. Scientists have recreated some of the fragrances based on bits of materials and finished products that they found on site. The fragrances are on display at the Capitoline Museum in Rome.
Filed Under: Bramble Berry News
That’s right, a band called Captain Seahorse is going to be where we’re putting some of our charitable donation funds this month. Downtown Renaissance Network helps to pick up where Bellingham City services leave off – for example, DRN pays for someone to clean up trash off the streets. (Total aside: how pathetic is it that private industry has to pay to do what, in theory, is supposed to be a public works department, taxpayer sponsored job?). They also do cool, community events like the Bite of Bellingham where bands play, food is served and the community has a family oriented, safe way to come together and celebrate summer.
Bramble Berry and Otion are incredibly excited to sponsor the opening band Captain Seahorse for the Bite of Bellingham this year. If you’re in the area, join us. If you’re not, think good thoughts and pray for good weather for our outdoor concert!
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
My best friend’s son, Kyle, was recently diagnosed for an intrinsic brain stem glinoma. For the blissfully uninitiated, that means that he has an inoperable brain tumor. For once, I have something to obsess about that’s not soap or business related. So, I’ve spent copious amounts of time in the last five weeks searching, searching, and searching the ‘net for information, would-be cures, pediatric oncologists, pediatric neurosurgeons and the holy grail of a doctor that will try to operate on Kyle. I’m about 0 for 45 on that count. But, I keep searching and trying.
When I don’t find what I want, I switch terms, try the ” ” in different places or just plain skip to page 10 on the search engine and hope that it’s a better fit than the first 5 pages of non-hits. I never switch search engines. It turns out that I’m not alone in this. According to Convera, 93% of search engine users don’t switch to a new engine if they’re not getting the answer they want out of the first engine.
Why not? They’re different companies, with different algorithms. You would think that we’d all switch. But instead, we just bang our head against the same wall, but in a slightly different spot by trying to refine the search engine terms.
Only 10% of searchers find what they want on the first attempt. And only 21% of online searchers feel like their search engines understand the queries.
Well, duh. They’re computers, not humans. Of course they don’t “understand” your search engine query! But aside from that, artificial intelligence is supposed to be farther along than only getting 10% of our search engine queries right.
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
I had the great privilege of serving on the Women’s Hall of Fame board this year. We had our awards banquet this weekend and to the left, is a photo of me speaking to Mauri Ingram (on left) from the Community Foundation and Rachel Meyers (on right) from Whatcom County Literacy Council.
The Women’s Hall of Fame honored four amazing women for their outstanding service to Whatcom County. I was most touched by Rosalinda Guillen who spoke passionately about the plight of the farm worker and the need to reinstill a sense of pride in the important work that they do.
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
It seems like if you have enough money, time and high powered attorneys that you can get anything trademarked. Speaking from experience, I tried for five or six years to get Bramble Berry trademarked (and finally got put on the supplemental registry!) but it took serious effort, time and money. If Pfizer can trade mark “Thank you very much,” I don’t see why the Trademark office gave me such grief over trying to trade mark “Bramble Berry.”
Trademarked phrases:
Thank you very much. Pfizer.
Yes. Book-of-the-month club
Thank you! THank you! Little Casars
Very Funny. TBS
What’s your number? Express
And service marked:
ThankYou. Citigroup.
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
The Paper Element truly makes some of the most sassy background paper for signs. It can easily take Rub-Ons so that makes it versatile for greeting cards (if you’re like me and you happen to do both). Be thinking about your summer craft show booths. How nice would a uniform sign program look? For what it’s worth, I ordered $250 worth of heavy stock paper for signage at Otion for this summer and fall.
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
I just got a fun note from Mr. Wood in South Korea who read the Yahoo Finance page story on me. I like the FBI connection. I am going to write him back and see what kind of business he’s going to start up. I also am interested to dialogue with him about the challenges of setting up a business in South Korea.
Ms. Faiola,I just loved your story on yahoo.com. It epitomizes the American dream. It’s awesome!I, too, wanted to join the FBI after the military. I was recruited in NC but the wait was too long for me, 8-10 months. So I ended up working with UNIX-based systems. I think it was the better choice in the long-term.I’m trying to start a small business, too, but it’s not easy drumming up customers. I’m keeping my day job for now. 🙂
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
Chris and I went out to dinner last night with a super cool couple – Max and Sarah from Handcrank Films.
We went to Anthony‘s and watched the most amazing sunset, complete with hundreds of seagulls drifting up on air currents and a double rainbow! It was entirely picturesque and reminded me why I live in Bellingham – because the 4 days a year that it’s not raining or having an epic windstorm that rips my roof off and breaks my retail store windows, it’s gorgeous.
Dinner was delightful and I was entirely inspired by Max’s theory on working to live and not the other way around. When he mentioned that he worked 40 hours a week or less, I about fell off my chair in jealous amazement. Here’s a small business owner – and a successful one! – who is living the dream of working a normal week while still running his own show.
When the entire table, spouses included, started animatedly talking about what work meant to each of us, I realized that it’s easy for me to put in 70 hour weeks routinely because I love what I do. I literally work my hobby. It’s a dream job. I’m surrounded by people I genuinely respect and admire. I have an amazing customer base. And, I get to immerse myself in soap, toiletries and good smelling things all day long. What’s not to love? So, when I find myself logging into work at 10 p.m. at night, it’s not with a heavy heart and irritation. I log into work with supreme joy and anticipation over what I will find and be able to accomplish.
Last night, over brownie fudge sundae dessert at the Bellweather, surrounded by great new friends and in a wonderful atmosphere, I felt so lucky and blessed. I’m going to try to hold onto that feeling for the rest of the week.
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
Scenic Route Paper Co. creates some amazing wrapping paper designs for soap. You can find a list of local retailersto get yourself 10 sheets for about $7.50-$10.00 and wrap up your soap in a beautifully sophisticated and eye catching manner. Remember, it’s all about differentiating yourself from other bars of soap out there and elevating yourself from a mere commodity to an experience, a gift to be treasured. Great wrapping is one step of that process.
Filed Under: Personal Ramblings
I just read an interesting posting saying that bar soap was becoming a thing of the past. The rationale for this theory is that consumers are switching to liquid soap for any number of things – from fragrances, to added vitamins to larger bottles of soap meaning less trips to the grocery story.
While I get that soap and bathing is very much a personal preference, the reality is that soap (any soap – liquid or bar) is a rinse-off product. Rinse-off means that extra vitamins don’t much matter – they wash right down the drain.
Less trips to the grocery store? Well, maybe but I don’t know that this is the case either. You use more liquid soap per use than bar soap. And generally, liquid soap costs a minor fortune compared to bar soap.
And fragrances? I take umbrage to the idea that liquid soap somehow has more fragrance options! As someone who sells bar soap fragrances, I am pretty sure anything you can get in a liquid soap, I can get you for bar soap.
I think that Joyce is overstating the liquid soap case and believe that bar soap is definitely here to stay.
Filed Under: Business Musings
I came across this thread on the SoapDish Forum today. It should be required reading for all new soapmakers and business people.
We have aggressive SPAM filters at work but still Bramble Berry gets thirty to ninety emails a day that want to buy our product (without knowing what our product is), give us money (normally from a deposed dictator that obtained said-money fraudulently), or just want us to invest in some new company (which will be hitting it big “any day now!”). It’s irritating from a normal “Ugh, and I waste my time on this?!” standpoint, baffles me from a “And yet people believe this myth be true enough times to make it worth the scammer’s while” perspective and infuriates me from a “And I pay someone to sift through these emails?!” view.
Supposedly filtering SPAM costs $874 per employee per year. I’m not surprised. So, that means that I spend $21,850 (give or take a few hundred dollars) per year because some industrious spammer bought a program to send out Viagra emails to 30,000 people per hour and .0001% of those people end up buying the Viagra, thus making it worth said spammers money.
I love this quote from the article referenced above:
“If one of out of every 72 of your employees showed up to work and slept all day, you’d be upset about that, but you’re losing that productivity simply because you have spam coming through.”
But I digress. Head over to the ‘Dish and read the thread about one small soaper’s dilemma on whether to treat a phishing-type email as a legitimate business inquiry. It certainly gave me food for thought.