Happy Labor Day

Hi guys.  I just wanted to share this video with you as you celebrate Labor Day this year.

Stay awesome

I Sell Dresses But I Am Not In The Dress Business

I Sell Dresses 

But that is not my business

My part-time pizza delivering job gives me plenty of time to myself.  Sometimes I listen to music while I drive. Sometimes I listen to news radio or sports radio.  Sometimes I just stick my iPhone into the external jack of the car stereo and let Pandora do the rest.  

But every now and then I pop a book on CD or CD audio program into my stereo and listen as I drive delivering pizzas.  Last month a friend of mine, who knows of my entrepreneurial spirit, suggested a book to me.  It's called The E Myth Revisited.  BTW, it's a sequel to the original The E Myth. 

If you are interested in reading for yourself you can find the book by clicking right here.  Or learn more about the author and his program by clicking right here
By the way, that does not mean that I endorse the above-mentioned program and/or book.  I just wanted to share and I am making no money from sharing. It's just good old fashioned word of mouth advertising.

A tiny weeny bikini's best friend
Picture altered for affect
so don't worry most sundresses are not that transparent

So again I ask myself, "What business am I in?" I don't really have much background in women's fashions because, well, I'm not a woman.  And if you've read my earlier blog posts than you know that I didn't start out by selling dresses.  


Here is what I want to sell

What I really want to do is sell furniture and home decor products from Thailand.  

Rugs

Fabrics

Decorations

Light Fixtures

Leathers

      And a lot more...
But that's not what I want to be known for.  Everybody sells furniture and home decor.  Everybody claims that they have the best, or the most, or the cheapest, or something else that will get you inside their store to buy their goods.

I don't want to be in the home decor business.  I don't even want to promote my business as furniture and design...although my background, technically, is interior design.  Like my website says, We find the cure for boring dwelling spaces.  We find the cure for boring. Period.

What big businesses are so good at is converting the process of finding a place to rest your buns into something insignificant.  Furniture, home decor, case goods, and the like are all now mass produced with machines that manufacture to specific dimensions based on some type of algorithm appropriate to your own needs.  Materials are cheap plastics and vinyls upholstered over plywood or composite wood.  

And it's not just the manufacturer's fault.  Furniture stores are so huge now that they have stores within stores.  You walk through the bedroom department, to the kitchen department, to the living room department, to the game room or movie department passing arm chairs by the dozen.  It's not always bad to have so many options available to you.  After all, the concept of variety has worked out fairly well for Baskin Robbins.

But when you see item after item and the only difference between any of them is the dye lot when changing colors it gets a little boring.  Yawn.  How about something with style, substance, and a story to go with it?  

A picture of my adorable son at age 1

A picture of an oil on canvas painting of my son
that proudly displays in my own home

   

--  











  

             If you are the kind of person who walks into a room and falls in love with it because it says something then you are the person I am trying to talk to.  You are the person passionate about life, passionate about history or culture, passionate about passion without rhyme or reason.

My business is to find a better way...

My business is to cure boredom.  My business is to let the awesomeness that is uniquely you find a place to sit down and hang out.  My business is to give you a new way of seeing the place you call home...or office...or anywhere else.  And business is pretty damn good.

What I don't have is the money to launch it like a space rocket.  Those who have read my blog have already know.  If you are new to my blog let me answer your question.  I am selling sundresses as a way to raise capital so that everything we've just mentioned can actually happen.  And here's the good news.  I am offering an irresistible offer to all who feel the same way that I do.  I am introducing a loyalty program that will, literally, blow your socks off.  I am introducing the $5 sundress.  Here's how it works.

# is a symbol used by Twitter.  If you have already bought a sundress (or two) and if you have a Twitter account then send a tweet about your dress.  It could be as simple as "I bought a sundress from @importblue"  By the way, that's my Twitter handle.  Of course, it could be a little more creative.  I'll explain why in just a moment.  If you have yet to buy a dress then you could tweet something like "I want to buy a dress from @importblue"  Each tweet will qualify you for the $5 sundress.  That's 80% off the retail price.  And that's not just for one dress.  That's for all dresses you will ever buy from Blue Orchid Imports from now until the end of time.  Sound irresistible yet?

It gets even better.  There's a reward for the person who has the most creative tweet and/or the most creative hashtag.  You could hashtag something like #IfoundAbetterWay to buy sundresses from @importblue, or #MyDressIsNotBoring @importblue or anything else creative.  The hashtag rules are simply this.  It has to contain the words "boring," "cure," "business," or "better way" in it.  The reward is a year's worth of free dresses.  That's 100% off the retail price.  Irresistible? I think so...and I think you think so, too.

Creativity is key.  Include a photo in your tweet (yes, Instagrams that are linked to Twitter will count as long as they include the proper hashtags) to increase the activity.  You could tweet a picture of yourself in a sundress, a picture of a day at the beach or at the pool and how you use your dress as a swimsuit cover.  You could tweet a picture of how you accessorize with jewelry, boots, jackets, or whatever.  You could tweet a picture of a family photo showing all the women of the family in sundresses.  It's up to you.  The sky is the limit.  Just remember to keep everything tasteful.  The contest for free dresses starts from now until July 4 of this year.  

And if you don't have Twitter?  Click here

So let's recap.  Send me a tweet about sundresses and you are included into the $5 dress program.  For life.

Each tweet from now until July 4 qualifies you for a chance to win free sundresses for a year.

Tweets must have the proper hashtag.  The more creative the better your chances of winning.

You can send as many tweets as you want.  If you have more than one tweet you have much better chances of winning.

In order to win the free dresses you have to buy at least one dress.  

Thanks for reading.  If you have questions you can email me at andrew@importblue.com or you can send me a Twitter @importblue

I Don't Speak Thai But I Try

Just For Fun ฝรั่งร้องเพลงในภาษาไทย

I thought I would share a little something about one of the largest challenges in my business--the language barrier.



Here is a video that one of my friends posted on Facebook a couple of weeks ago.  I have no idea who this singer is, but I thought it was kind of fun and rather creative.  

For anyone who has ever spent more than two weeks outside of one's own home country this video is for you.  I think the essence of both confusion and frustration is captured quite well in Maggie's video.

I have been able to speak Thai fairly well for over ten years, but I am a little rusty.  I learned that the hard way when I went to Thailand last year to help set up my business.  Nevertheless, after a week or so I felt more comfortable because my brain was overcoming the language equivalent of jet lag.  

Then earlier this year-- in the middle of the night-- I received a phone call from one of my contacts in Thailand.  My brain was in sleep mode.  If any of you have ever been awakened in the middle of the night you know what I mean.  Imagine that kind of torture on your mind plus having to listen, process, and then respond in a foreign tongue.  Such is the price of doing international business.  

But like I said, I liked Maggie's video so much because of its authenticity.  So I decided to make a little video of my own.  

It was kind of fun to sing the little jingle.  All music and lyrics are the intellectual property of Maggie Rosenberg.

That's why today's blog is a little bit late.  Enjoy!

Dresses For Sale

These are some of the dresses for sale. And this not even half of what I have in stock. If you want to know more details please leave a comment in the comment section below.

More photos to come later.

And, yes, I know that the blog could use a facelift.  All in good time.  It's coming soon.  Today is substance over style.

Thanks for reading and be awesome instead.

Big Changes Start Small

Why is there a picture of a dress?
I'll get to that in just a moment.

Here is what I want to say. 
 For the very few of you who are reading my blog, namely my wife and my wife's step father you probably already know what I 'm going to say.  Maybe the two of you can help spread the word about this post and my business.  Anyway if you are here then you may have already read something about my business.  Maybe you have read about my Kickstarter campaign.  Well, guess what?  It failed.  I do not want to say that it failed, but it did not raise enough of the money I  needed in order to complete the project.  

Let me start from the beginning.  

This is my not-so-long version of my story.

Just before Christmas of 2011 I got fired.  I can now admit to myself and to the rest of the world that it was my fault.  I got lazy. I got bored. I didn't really like the job I had in the first place, but it paid the bills.  In other words I was living a lifestyle that I didn't want in the first place and I was spending all of my time working for a life that I didn't like.  I knew it and my wife knew it and she couldn't see it at the time because it was so gradual but I had slowly moved away from the man she married.  

This is my lovely
 and awesome wife, Laci

The job just sucked  it sucked all of my creative powers from me and I was just looking for a way out of it.  What I should have done was listen to my gut instinct the fist day of the job when I realized that this was not the job for me.  In stead of listening to that inner voice I came up with the excuse that our new family needed the money and it was better than my painting job or my job in retail sales at Macy's.  The pay increase was nice at first.  I was actually relieved to have 30,000 dollars a year, and at the time it was the most money I had ever earned  It opened up a lot of new possibilities or so I thought.  That was the voice I kept listening to when I should have listened to the real voice within me that said, "You were not meant for this! You did not go to college for this!  This is not what you do! This is not who you are.  This is not your passion!"

Well, thanks to a cold in the middle of December, and a really bad work behavior that consisted of: showing up up late, and leaving early, and an overall resentment towards just about everybody in my department--when I came into work late on December 12, 2011-- I came into my cubicle I saw no keyboard where it should have been, and I saw a note that sad the manager needed to speak with me.  So when the manager had a free moment I walked into his office and he shut the door.  He said that I was terminated for lack of respect and that I was to gather my belongings and leave my key to the office on the desk.  

Wow! what a feeling that was.  
The only real feeling in my heart and in my mind was "How do I tell my wife that I just got fired?"  
The first days and weeks were quite uneasy since it was still Christmas time and I didn't want to make Christmas worse than it already was going to be.  I'm sure my wife wanted to kill me...or at the very least, go get another job because she was quite afraid that we would end up back in a lifestyle that she grew up with. 

 I guess she was very familiar with having lots of extra month at the end of the money.  But something within her told her to hold her tongue, trust me, and support me in my decision.  So Laci, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for letting me do what i have done.

And I guess I should thank my former employer for doing the thing that I couldn't do...end the relationship at work and letting me be free to do want I was really meant to to.  One day I will have the sincerity to do that... so just hold on if my former employer or anyone else from that job is reading this.  I'm working on it.

During that awkward time when I was just newly fired one of the questions that came to mind was whether or not I should continue with my business trip scheduled for March 2012. In late summer 2011 I had enough drive to say that I was going to officially start my own business doing the very thing that I wanted to do--import home decor and furniture from Thailand.  

On August 12, 2011  (anyone in Thailand knows how significant that day is) I officially formed Blue Orchid Imports LLC after months of figuring what type of business I wanted, how to get it started, and how to name it.  In fact, it was my wife who came up with the name... again thanks to Laci for helping me out with that.  Then in September 2011, I actually booked a plane ticket to Thailand and put myself...and my family into credit card debt.

That was why in December when we had the bad news of my job termination we questioned whether we could actually stay the course with my business plans.  Laci has been so graceful   She said to me, "Go follow your dreams" and in March of 2012 I traveled to Thailand to find markets, vendors, people, anyone, and anything that would help me along the way.  

Well, it has now been one year since then and sometimes it seems that the only things we have from that trip are a lot of bills yet to be paid.  When I came home from my business trip I searched high and low for the resources that would help me get to where I wanted to  be.  I knew banks wouldn't give me the time of day, but I knew of a small enterprise fund called the Utah Micro Enterprise Loan Fund that loans out up to 25,000 dollars in business loans.  I worked for months trying to get a loan that would help me get things moving.  After all of that work they still said no.

I also tried to do some crowd funding, through this brand new innovation called Kickstarter.  I figured that If I couldn't get one institution to give me 10,000 dollars I could get 10,000 people to give me a dollar each.  As I mentioned earlier,that didn't work.

So what do we do? 
 Now that I have the ability to look back I think that it may have been serendipitous that I had the many experiences that I did within the past year.  When I first got off the plan in Bangkok the first thing I did after I placed my luggage in my hotel room was go to the Chatuchuk  Market just outside of the city  Keep in mind that after 24 hours of travel, jet lag, and instant heat and humidity increase, the last thing I wanted to do was hit the streets. But I knew that I didn't have much time and so I hit the markets.


Among all of the booths and markets that I ran into, one of the things that actually caught my eye was a vendor for sundresses. 



 I'm an interior designer, not a fashion designer so what the heck was I doing looking for fashions?

And not just any fashions, women's fashions?

I really don't know why I did, but I did.  I had some photos and I messaged the  photos to one of my colleagues who now lives in Florida and she loved them.

 By the way, I love how awesome technology is!  Even five years ago I could not have been able to communicate the way I was able to do last year.  Thanks to Facebook, and Twitter, and smartphones, and  the Internet, and photo sharing and so forth. Totally awesome.  Saved my butt. 

When my friend and colleague took a look at those dresses in the photo she wanted to know if I could get some for her.  I said sure.  They didn't cost very much and I could squeeze enough room in my luggage for a few dresses.  Well, one thing lead to another and I had about four or five orders for dresses from a couple of friends who wanted some.

I also ran into an Englishman living and working in Bangkok.  He works for supercheap freight.com  and he specializes in shipping.  As I went there one day to send some of my personal effects home we engaged in conversation. He mentioned that there were plenty of people who buy small flea market items such as sundresses and ship them home to sell on eBay.  He said that these people actually made a good living doing so.

I didn't think much of the conversation at the time, but but I am glad I remembered.  One of the reasons I remembered him so well because he was  the only vendor I could find in all of Thailand that would accept Pay Pal.  

I also happened to run into a friend of a friend who knew enough English and was an expert at bank transfers and fashion.  I didn't think much of the experience at the time, but it has proven to be quite valuable as I will explain later.

Anyway, fast forward to when the Utah Micro Enterprise Loan Fund failed and the Kickstarter project failed and I was left wondering how i was going to get any money at all to start this business.  I was fed up. I was mad. I was worried and I knew that our current plan was not going to work.  So I told my wife that we would do whatever it took to get us going.  We have already made some sacrifices along the way and we have some pretty big sacrifices yet to come.

Thanks again to my loving and supportive wife who has agreed to help me out.  I thought that if we couldn't get enough money to import the big home decor items then we would scale it back even more and start even smaller.  I was going to sell sundresses as a way to raise money   After all the Marriott company stated with a husband and wife who sold root beer.  Look at them now.  Pretty impressive.

So that's what we have decided to so.  But that's not all.  My wife, Laci, who I love, has a little blog of her own that she calls That Yarn Girl.  She loves to crochet.  She started doing it as a hobby and would make a few things for friends, but she had a small little idea to sell some things.  She just didn't know how.  I hinted a few times that she could join forces with me and sell her crochet items along with my imported sundresses and that's what we're going to do.

So this spring and summer we will be working together side by side.  During the winter I have saved up enough money by delivering pizzas to buy some dresses and ship them here so we could sell them in the spring.  I also used up a little bit of whatever credit I had available to buy some mannequins online to help with our display.  

You remember me mentioning that person I met in Thailand who worked at a bank and could speak English   Well, I asked her if she could be my purchasing agent.  She has been a lifesaver!  She has done all of the heavy lifting in buying the dresses and shipping them here.  Wow, you never know what's going to come your way!

So Laci and I will be selling items together for the spring and summer so we can get enough money to self fund our fist major purchase.  I figure we'll need at least 10,000 dollars to get our first shipment.  Maybe a little more than that now.  But that's what we're working for.

We're not just looking for money to take care of our needs, we're having a little fundraiser.  We're putting everything into getting that first purchase made.  And I guess that's how you can help.  If you see us along the way please take a look at what we have to offer.  

I'm also going to give my website a bit of a face lift so that people can order sundresses online through Pay Pal or eBay or something.  So stay tuned for that to come.

What I want for all of you reading this right now is to consider how much it helps a friend by supporting my little business.  Please take a look a the dresses and crochet items and ask yourself if you could buy one or two.  Maybe even if you don't need one

So now that you have already read this long post that I said was not going to be long 

If you have read all of this than thank you. Keep coming back to my blog. I am going to put more thoughts and feelings on my blog and share more of my secrets. Just come back to my blog.  If you have already read all of this blog post today than please follow me and  and if there a is anything insightful just let me know.  Make a comment.  You know how blogs get going-- they share with other blogs.  They spread like fire on Facebook or Twitter or heck even Google+  

So please follow me along this journey and see what great items are to come.  

And if you know anyone who would like a sundress please direct them to my site.

Thanks for reading and be awesome.