How Did You Get Started?

I started this blog thinking that I would not have a great deal to write. Being a female, I tend to be rather collaborative, networky and cooperative by nature, and I now find myself wanting to share every moment with fellow entrepreneurs and anyone else who is interested. Sigh. Where to start? I will try to start from the very beginning.

First, a little background: Our company, PacEasy Inc., (www.paceasy.com) “designs and manufactures innovative storage and organization solutions to make life neat.” Pretty catchy, huh? I can't take the credit. Our flagship product is a really my awesome nylon fabric insert for plastic storage bins that has pockets in it. This keeps small items from getting lost in the big items, and Bin Buddies are great for any number of uses.

The idea for some kind of bin organizer came to me in a moment of utter despair on a camping trip. The first day, my husband and I drove 10 hours to our first night’s campsite. When we reached the campground, it was dusk and raining, the tent’s rainfly had not been packed, and I was hungry, tired, and wanted some dinner regardless. I opened my kitchen box and salt and pepper were everywhere. I remember something about raising my voice at the hapless husband and wanting to head back home. Luckily, we did not go home, and the rest of the trip went very smoothly.

How did you get started? Where did you get the idea? These are questions I am often asked, and I tell the camping story. What I don’t convey and what is more important to the journey is the time it took between the camping trip and the final prototype. I set out designing Bin Buddies with no real thought as to timeframes. After all, I had a very definite idea in my head, so what could be so hard about turning it into something more concrete in a couple of weeks? My first prototype took me three weeks to complete, and it looked nothing like the products that we sell today. About 18 months later, it all finally came together, even though I knew what I wanted when I started. During the process, I ended up going a number of different directions, some very far out there, before I circled back to my happy ending.

I busied myself with this project most evenings. Some days, I just could not bring myself to sew another stitch. Midway through, I started a new job and only worked sporadically on the prototypes. A lot of time was spent searching the market for products similar to mine (there weren’t any, thank goodness), thinking about the materials I needed and then attempting to source them (a very time-consuming task—I will cover this extensively in later blogs), and simply figuring out how to sew things together (my mother taught me to sew, but I am no professional), as I had no patterns to follow except my own. Along the way, I sought advice and assistance from many people, and I found that all of them were happy to help me. Get over the fear of asking those close to you for help, guidance, and expert advice.

I think the thing that kept me going for those 18 months was the fact that I so enjoyed what I was doing. My brain loved the stimulation and challenge of creation. I loved the feeling of accomplishment when I successfully completed a task, be it finding the right materials, designing the next prototype or finishing sewing it up.

It’s this time spent on numerous trials and errors and triumphs that you never hear about in most books touting the clueless entrepreneur's or inventor's life. You open the book’s cover and begin reading, and it seems that the product idea was hatched one night, prototyped the next, produced in a week or so overseas, and then successfully marketed to big box stores the following week. If this is what you are getting out of the book, its pages are best used to start campfires on your next camping trip. They are much better for toasting marshmallows than for providing any kind of usable advice. For some, a great idea takes little time to develop and bring to market, but for most, I think you will find it will indeed take some time, and it will be time well spent. You can check out books that I found useful for myself on the book list on this site.

Why This Blog?

I read my "little corner of the world" blog pretty regularly (www.westseattleblog.com), read a few others occasionally, but I had never considered writing my own blog. I am a small business owner. Why would I complicate my life and eat up even more of my precious little free time with a blog? Because I found myself part of a growing informal email network of fellow startup manufacturers, many of us "mompreneurs" and women entrepreneurs, all of us seeking the same bits of information about the small stuff but finding nothing that could really help us beyond a certain point or fill in the fine details. There were a few excellent starter books, tidbits on the web, a couple of bulletin boards, and "small business" help sites whose creators wrote as if Microsoft were a small business, but not much for the likes of me and the people with whom I was corresponding. So, here we are.
I am hoping to have the time to post something every couple of weeks regarding my romp through my experiences with entrepreneurism and building my manufacturing business. I hope that those who read the posts will find something interesting or that they can use. My business partner, Thomas, and I, are somewhat unusual in that we love to share information and spread the word so that others can climb their own ladders to success with fewer rough spots along the way.
Our first break from the usual model is our partners page on our company website: http://www.paceasy.com/partners_pe.html. We can't grow in a vaccuum, and we are eternally grateful to these companies and individuals for their support and willingness to work with us, clueless as we are. I encourage all of you clueless entrepreneurs to take the time to recognize those of your partners who are helping to make your company a success.
Stay tuned!