Throughout the year I journal about my business in a soft-bound notebook of the kind you used to see students with neck scarves pondering over in cafes. Well I still buy those notebooks! And in a different colour every year because it brings me joy! At the end of the year I do a review of my progress - what worked and what didn’t, developments and losses etc. This year I thought I’d share some of that process with you.

January - york and goodbyes.

The beginning of the year is traditionally when I take things easy, but I seem to have hit the ground running in January. It’s usually a slow month for orders, so I decided on a whim to run a 20% discount across my online shop and did quite well. My studio journal includes details of a saga with Evri over missing parcels that extends into March (and sees me spending some eye-opening time reading anti-Evri message board threads), a saga I don’t seem to recall now, presumably because my mind blocked out the bad memories to protect me.

I also submitted my tax return for the previous year, some of which I finished while accompanying my fella on a work trip to York, which made me feel very cosmopolitan and like a proper busy-lady a la Working Girl, but in a much less impressive way, and with smaller hair. After three days of scrabbling around for receipts and trying to access online bank statements from 12 months ago, I vowed to start my next one at the close of the tax year in April, rather than ostriching until the cut off date the following January.

But the big news this month was when I closed my space at Red Brick Market in Birmingham after 10 months. RBM was an experiment for me and I admit I had misgivings from the start. In the end it just wasn’t worth the rent and effort to maintain it, plus I had thefts and the damp was damaging my stock. Possibly my work doesn’t appeal to their customer base, but undoubtedly the roadworks in Digbeth are affecting footfall. Still, the £75 per month that I will save in rent can be invested elsewhere.

February - gaming and e-blasts

This month I got to grips with designing graphics on Canva (and even paid for a subscription - worth it!) to use for marketing and email blasts. My journal notes that at this point I have a whopping 32 subscribers to these, which I seem to be very pleased with.

This was the month that I gained one of my most successful stockists so far - Bad Kitty in Birmingham. This Warhammer and D&D shop / cafe / gaming space was the catalyst behind various new designs popular with the crossover demographics of gamers, goths and the LGBTQ+ community. I tell you, the openness of the fantasy gaming world is refreshing! I have my husband to thank for introducing me to this, albeit obliquely, when he decided that he needed to start gaming again after a nearly 25 year hiatus. Of course now he’s addicted and regularly disappears to tournaments for days at a time, but it keeps him off the streets. After the disappointment of the Red Brick Market, I was happy to have found a stockist that was performing well.

March - emo adoration plus measurement confusion

Each year I re-enact an internal argument over the month I should start doing arts markets again after the post-xmas break. For most makers the months leading up to Christmas are the most lucrative. Nonetheless I signed up for two markets in March. And this is the basis of my internal battle each year: with a combined stall fee of £65 and combined sales of £217, was my £152 profit worth schlepping my stock around and standing in cold community halls for two days? Probably not. However, if you believe that markets are as much about promotion as they are sales, then who knows how successful they were? Someone may have taken a business card and bought something later in the year. And at one market I was approached by the organiser of a different market who went on to offer me two spots over the summer, so perhaps that proves my point. Or not, I don’t know. Thus the battle continues.

With stock flying out the door at Bad Kitty for a second month, I launched a range of retro-themed earrings and pin badges to appeal to their customer base. Gameboys, cassette tapes, Rubik’s cubes, Pacman - you get the idea.

Puzzle Cube Lapel Pins were popular with the Bad Kitty crowd.

Over at Curlew Espresso in Bromsgrove, my celestial snake earrings were bought by a regular who wore them to a meet-and-greet with the emo band My Chemical Romance while they were touring. Apparently Gerard, the lead singer, admired them, and now my jewellery can legitimately be advertised as ‘admired by someone famous’.

With my first big outdoor market coming up in April, I bought a tarp to protect the back of my stall. But being me I misread the measurements and bought an 8-metre long tarp instead of the 8-feet I needed. I was too embarrassed to return it, so I bought a second, smaller version. I am now the proud owner of an unused, gigantic tarp, but perhaps it will be useful if I ever need to keep leaves out of an outdoor swimming pool?

April - label fun and a lost stockist

With my profits from last Christmas burning a hole in my tea caddy, I decided to invest in my business and forked out £100 for a Polono label printer that was on sale on Amazon. My liberal use of exclamation marks in my journal is not unwarranted - it really is “amazing” and I still squeal each time it spits out a franked, adhesive postage label.

My first date at Kings Heath Artisan Market was a great success despite the gusty winds blowing my lightweight stock into the street multiple times. It was the largest stall I’d had for a long time (most indoor stalls are 6x3 feet) so I was able to display lots more stock than usual.

I bought a pink table cover (massive bedsheet) to match my cards.

Sales at Bad Kitty continued to perform well and I had one of the best months of trading I’ve had in a long while, so it was very upsetting to hear that they were forced to close abruptly at the end of the month. It seems that a contentious unpaid electricity bill was the cause - one day a man simply turned up and cut the power. Over the next few months the owner tried to reach an agreement with the power company, but to no avail. Goodbye to one man’s livelihood, a thriving shop that had become a community space, goodbye to another independent business in the sea of franchises that is Birmingham’s city centre, and of course goodbye to a really successful part of my own business.

May - body glitches and Etsy glitches

I began my birthday month with a sore back - something I’ve suffered with since my 20’s. Lifting boxes of stock and standing all day at markets never helps, but this time it was caused by ‘going rogue’ while I tried to follow a Yoga with Adrienne video on YouTube in an attempt to strengthen my ‘core’ (aka bag-of-jelly). I had ample time to hate myself while I lay on the sofa for a few days.

In the middle of the month The Gallery at Pershore became a new stockist, which cheered me up after losing the precious Bad Kitty. We took a trip to Pershore (Plum Town!) to deliver the pieces, and now want to live there because it’s so pretty. Unfortunately I will need to sell a lot more earrings to be able to afford this.

Towards the end of May a glitch on the Etsy website meant that I sold one pair of earrings to two different people within a couple of days, despite it being ‘sold out’. Of course this shouldn't happen and of course I couldn't find an answer, or a way of reporting it to the Etsy overlords. Luckily the second buyer agreed to accept a slightly different pair, but I vowed to pay better attention to my listings on Etsy and only stock items I have multiples of in the future.

June - Birmingham Museums and teaching opportunities

My journal for this month talks a lot about making, photographing and listing items on my website and Etsy shop, so clearly I was feeling productive. The warm weather has this effect on me, let’s call it a lack of seasonal depression. I had a good month of online orders and did a couple of markets, picking up some new Instagram followers too.

I also had two exciting developments this month. Firstly, a buyer from Birmingham Museums Trust enquired about wholesale prices for my retro gaming jewellery - they thought it would sell really well at the science gallery, Thinktank. Secondly, Sara Priesler who runs the Stratford School of Jewellery invited me to run some workshops there and her new location in Stirchley, Birmingham. I took a trip to Stratford (omg I’d forgotten how lovely it is) to see her amazing shop and teaching space, and we talked about the type of classes I could run.

On a high from these surprising developments I managed to finish my tax return for the 2022-23 year, finish some new designs and write an extended blog post on how I made The Lovers celestial earrings, which I included in my next email blast. How very professional of me, just like Melanie Griffith!

I’m so glad I have top-notch photoshop skills now!

The first half of 2023 held some surprising highs and disappointing lows for The Cluttery. Probably the most promising development was being invited to teach classes, as that’s a new direction for me and full of potential. Losing Bad Kitty as a stockist was a big setback. The customer base there was exactly what I needed to inspire me to expand the retro, quirky side of my design portfolio. Plus, they had disposable income and enjoyed spending it on themselves, which is great news for any business!

Goodbye to 2023 - part one