What A Year!

Being a solo-preneur that runs a REALLY tight ship means I deal with a lot of numbers. Like a LOT a lot. Our “systems” here are old school - as in, what I learned in school I apply every day - by hand! No bar codes, no upc’s, no sku’s, no inventory software, no automated re-ordering program, no powerpoint spreadsheet whatchamacallits - it’s just me, my pencil and my adding machine. Many days I think how nice it might be to have all that taken care of and I just check in on it occasionally. But then I wonder/worry, ‘if you aren’t doing it by hand, are you really even keeping in touch?’ (pun totally intended)

I actually like getting down in the thick of it and knowing EXACTLY where we stand at all (ok, most) times! At least that’s the line I feed myself any time I contemplate upgrading/updating/hiring a more efficient method to crunching numbers. I also recognize the expense of doing that and like always, it comes back to our bottom line and I refuse to pass any expenses along to our customers that I don’t need to.

It’s because of our faithful customers that I am so excited to report 2019 has been our best sales year yet! The growth of our email subscribers, our social media followers, our Pinners, our Workshop attendees, and especially our many, many word-of-mouth referrals has all helped Oopsy Daisy become a household name not only here in Texoma but throughout much of North Texas and beyond!

As I have mentioned several times on social media, the sales, the sign-ups ~ those are all great but it is the STORIES I come to work for! I love love lovvvve hearing how a new customer came to find us and subsequently becomes one of our friends (more than a customer) that we continue to learn so much more about! Graduations, first day of schools, proposals, parents passing, babies born, big moves, honeymoons planned, honey-DO’S planned, holidays, happy days, not-so-happy days….. I get to hear about them all! Some of the best are the no-reasons. The friend (that started out as a customer, remember) that just drops by for no reason other than they feel comfortable here and came to hang out and look around. #wineoptional

So since I am a numbers from stories geek, imagine my delight when I tallied up our tallies. Huh? If you weren’t aware, we casually keep a daily tally beside our cash register and add to it when we learn it is a visitor’s first time in. Like the rest of my bookkeeping (eyeroll wink) it is a little archaic but it gets the job done. Most days. Sometimes, especially in our busiest Spring season, we just don’t get time to get back inside from the Garden to mark every single newbie down. Some days there are so many new faces, we lose count!

Nevertheless, I record the weekly total we did capture right there in my college-ruled notebook along side my daily sales figures and weather report. (see? #geek) As the year comes to a close and I am preparing my various pages and numbers into a presentable format for our accountant, I just added up the “New People” entries for each week. Holy smokes! As of this blog post, we have had a total of 1,171 people who have never been here before grace our store this year!! An average of a hundred first-timers a month?? I’ll take that! And the best part is that I’d say 99.9% of them come back a second, third, fourth, fifth time……

So T H A N K Y O U!! Thank you for following us on social, tagging your friends, telling your neighbors about us, posting your Oopsy Daisy finds, and for supporting us! To see this silly idea of upcycling an old gas station into such a successful, sweet community and all it has become, my little heart says “filler up!”