Seed for Success | Empowering Women Entreprenuers

I met with Fast Pivot, my web development company, yesterday. They shared two new website designs with me. Both look great! I really like their vision. Hopefully we can complete the design process soon and move on to functionality. My coder, who wrote the canvas art designer application, is waiting for the new website so he can start the process of putting the application in it. He needs to make sure it works seamlessly with Yahoo’s merchant solutions. This may take some time and I’m anxious to start the process.

This morning my husband, Davis, and I met with Red Koala’s first mentor, Rosemary Coates from The AKA Group. She is an expert in manufacturing and distribution. She’ll be a great asset for us as we begin selling products. Our current production system hasn’t been tested yet, so I’m sure we’ll have plenty of questions for her as our business grows.

For now, we are focused on packaging and shipping. Our products are ordered one-by-one and are all different shapes and sizes. Rosemary suggested we call the big shipping companies and negotiate a rate. I had no idea you could do this. I always assumed that a shipping rate was a shipping rate, end of story. Our homework is to make those calls and position ourselves as a small business, with great growth potential, that needs a discount to meet budget constraints. We’ll see how that goes, but shipping is something we really do need a good rate on. She also suggested that we call around to local box companies to find the best packaging options. After we complete these two tasks we’ll schedule another meeting to go over next steps.

I have a meeting tomorrow with my primary mentor Christina Blenk of AFS Web and WomenOwned.com. I am very excited to speak with her and get her initial feedback of our company and vision.

Stay tuned!

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Posted by aport