If you're an email or YouTube subscriber, you will have noticed that my son Fred has joined Oakapple on a part time basis. Fred recently graduated from the University of York with a Marketing degree, so naturally I wanted to test out his skills! There were challenges for both of us - I've always worked on the business very much on my own, although I've had help on the selling side at events. I wasn't sure if I could let go of anything, and Fred, well sewing and quilting aren't high on his list of interests! The first task I set Fred was to find his way around Shopify, the platform I use for my website - he soon got the measure of that, I think his enjoyment of computer games stood him in good stead for this. On the first morning, Fred also set up a loyalty scheme and added stock to the website. Fred now shares the emails with me, we take turns in writing the newsletter, it really depends on who is free at the time. Because we have different styles of writing we decided from the outset that we would each use out own names rather than making a generic'we' email, and this has proved popular with customers. Fred has taken on the ordering of the quilt patterns, and he deals with the wholesale company to order those, and he has also been working on a barcode system - we are gradually adding barcodes into our inventory so that we can keep a track of products that are sold at events, and minimise being out of stock when something is ordered. Recently, I took Fred with me to The Knit Show, a trade show for fabric and yarn sellers. It was his first experience of this sort of event, but he seemed to enjoy it - especially the free lunch! You can see a vlog of our day on my YouTube channel here. It's thank to Fred that we are now stocking Emma Ball - he persuaded me that it would be a good seller and sure enough, the first lot sold out almost straight away! I also asked Fred if he could find another venue for my sewing retreats, something more south - and he's found a lovely place. We headed down to check it out and it looks very promising, we are just finalising the details and then it will be open to book. So after all, I think it's worked well - we've been able to find a way that suits us both, and hopefully more good things to come.
