Random thoughts for a grey day

[juthwara]

So I went out yesterday to put the new sticker on our license plate and put the new registration in the car. And I opened the envelope where we keep our registration and insurance information and discovered that while there were in fact two insurance cards in there, the newest one was six months out of date.

!!!

So I went back into the house and dug out the car insurance papers, and sure enough, the new card they had sent us last November was still with the rest of the stuff. In my defense, the insurance company used to send the new card in a separate envelope, but this year, it was in the huge envelope of incomprehensible policy statements that I didn't look at because it was the second copy they had sent us (they send one when you're going to renew your insurance and another when you actually have renewed the insurance - they're identical and written in an obscure form of Sanskrit, so I don't bother to try to read more than the first copy). However, we're darn lucky that we didn't actually need that insurance information for the six months we were driving around with an outdated card.


*****

Normally, I sell a combination of Naruto gloves and face mask, with a headband as an optional extra. In the Ebay store I share with my brother, there are also individual listings for the different kinds of gloves I sell. Normally, I sell just enough out of the store to pay for its monthly fees and justify keeping it. Last week a customer asked me if I sold face masks individually. So I created a listing in the store and figured I would sell to the customer and keep up the pattern of selling about one thing a month out of the store.

Well, by Sunday I had sold two face masks (in addition to three face mask/glove sets and a set of leather gloves - it was an unusually busy weekend). And as of today, I've sold four more, which makes a total of six mask sales in six days.

Apparently I've found an untapped market.

A little Ebay research shows that I'm right - while Naruto gloves are fairly common, there's only one other seller carrying face masks, and only in dark blue. And I can testify that while dark blue sells just enough to keep making it, as a rule, Naruto fans love their black costumes.

This pleases me immensely. Not merely the radical increase in sales, which is nice, of course. But the face masks are so easy to make. The gloves are varying degrees of pain in the tuckus to make - either I spend hours sewing around finger holes on knit gloves or I wreck up my hands cutting and punching holes in metal plate for the leather gloves. But face masks take about ten minutes apiece to make and so far have involved absolutely no bloodshed (until the day I have an appalling sewing machine accident where its seething hatred for me finally boils over and it tries to eat a finger or two instead of merely passive aggressivly trying to eat my fabric).


*****


We're still quite deficient in the area of baby stuff, since we mostly have a bizarrely random assortment of stuff that has been given to us (a diaper pail, a baby carrier, a bear that plays Brahms' lullaby, a receiving blanket found at longstrider's grandmother's house). But now we have a stroller. longstrider was visiting friends of ours who have a three-year-old, and I had asked him if we could ask them if we could try to fit their stroller in our trunk, as it's the type I'd been thinking of getting but wasn't sure if it would fit in our teeny tiny clown car. However, he got as far as saying, "So about your stroller-" and was immediately asked, "Do you want it?"

So he called me to ask if we wanted it, and I said yes, as long as it fit in the trunk. It did, so now we have a stroller.

Its only drawback is that it's a bit stiff, so we have to be very firm with it when folding and unfolding it. It came to us already folded up, so when we took it out of the car and unfolded it, we couldn't figure out how to fold it up again. It sat in the garage mocking us for a few hours, until I finally went out and got very firm with it. So now we can both fold and unfold it, which is a relief. I was beginning to be afraid we would have to buy a minivan to be able to carry our child's stroller around.

Comments

[chibirisu.livejournal.com]

Woot! Y'know, I'd thought about selling the masks individually, but it had seemed like people stopped buying the gloves the minute I put them in the store as opposed to individually listing them, so I didn't want to kill the mask market and the joint sales too. Glad to find out it doesn't work that way and they're popular! Especially since they're so easy to mass produce.