Our Goals for 2019

So…

in a recent post, I told you about some of the things that worked well for us in 2018, as well as some of the things that didn’t quite go as I had hoped. And now, with our 2018 assessment completed, I’m ready to talk a bit about our goals for the new year, 2019.

1) Our Show Schedule for 2019-
As far as our 2018 shows were concerned, I would have to say that it’s been a year of amazing highs and disappointing lows! Check it out!

Our Road to California show was our best Road2Ca show to date, and even though we were very happy with our first
Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival we have no idea how it will compare over the course of several years. It might actually turn out that our 2018 show was the best we’ll ever have, but I choose to think the opposite since we recently got word that we’re going to be able to move to a more advantageous location for the 2019 MAQF show! That was GREAT news!

But in April, the AQS Paducah show was nothing if not disappointing! When we left Paducah I was reasonably certain it was for the last time and that this was one trip we’d never make again. As a matter of fact we operated under that assumption until we got news at the Quilt Market in Houston that we had been moved to a much more favorable location at the 2019 Paducah show which we’re pretty excited about! Now fast forward to the AQS Virginia Beach show which was held in early October and set a new record for our  single worst show EVER for us! It was SO horrible for EVERYONE (including AQS) that AQS actually cancelled all future shows at this location!

And so it was with this backdrop that 3 short weeks later we got back in that Toyota and headed south to Houston and our two biggest shows of the year, the International Quilt Market & Festival. We were hoping against hope to reverse the downward course we’d been on for the past two shows, but what transpired was nothing short of AMAZING, because not only was the Quilt Market the best we’ve EVER had in 10+ years, but the Festival that followed was nothing short of INCREDIBLE! Needless to say, all of this was extremely satisfying and encouraging after the last two shows, and a wonderful way to close out 2018! And with that…..

Here’s our 2019 Show Schedule!

Road 2 California– Ontario, CA- Jan 24-27, 2019
Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival– Hampton, VA – Feb 28- Mar 3, 2019
AQS Quiltweek Paducah– Paducah, KY- April 24-27, 2019
International Fall Quilt Market– Houston, TX- Oct 26-28, 2019
International Quilt Festival– Houston, TX- Oct 31- Nov 3, 2019

2) Find a freight solution for the Road2Ca show; freight has continued to be an expensive problem for us! You might recall that several years ago we started driving ourselves to the Houston shows due primarily to the incredible cost of not only shipping our supplies but ALSO the HIGH storage & cartage fees once our shipment arrived. We still freight our supplies to California for the Road2Ca show, but dealing with UPS for the last two years has been frustrating. I’ll detail this more in a future post but I need to come up with a more reliable carrier for the 2019 show, that’s for SURE!!!

3) Develop a backup POS solution for retail shows; forgetting to bring my iPad to the AQS Virginia Beach show revealed a serious flaw in our POS (point of sale) system… we had absolutely NO backup for our checkout procedure, which is pretty darned serious if you think about it! I’ll discuss this more in a future post but suffice it to say that this problem along with the fact that our POS hardware is aging leads me to the conclusion that I MUST come up with a new system (and use the old system as the emergency backup)!

4) Our other business goals for 2019 are pretty much standard from year-to-year, ie;
publish two new patterns,
add any necessary new hardware to our line & develop a new zippertape,
continue growing our community on social media,
and publish a newsletter every month.

So…there you have it.

That’s what we’ll be shooting for this year! But hey, if you have any comments, or suggestions for us, especially zipper suggestions or ideas about how to grow our Instagram following, please feel free to leave them in the space provided below.

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