Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009 - 8:21 a.m.

Had a very good day at the show. Broke my one-day sales record by a good margin, but did not quite break my all-time show sales record, which is what I really wanted to do. I'm greedy. The new line sold some, but not as much as I had hoped. Marketing, merchandising, assortment variety, signal value, and pricing strategies are a puzzle. If you sell expensive things, your average sale can be $100-200, but for me, it was $20. Even though the booth median price is now higher. Those stupid $20 items. I feel like they're my bread-and-butter, so I'm reluctant to reconfigure anything too dramatically. I mean, what if I get rid of them and make more expensive stuff from my new collection, and still no one buys it? Maybe I should just be happy with how it's going.

No, I'm happy with it, but I always want to improve it. That's how you make progress, after all.

The in-laws came up to see me in action at the show. Very nice to see them. They brought us baby stuff and more baby-stuff-looking-at will occur today. Oh yeah, as we were waiting for J to bring the car at tear-down, guess what mil asked me? "Have you thought about what you're going to do with the baby's room?" Me: "I thought we'd put a baby in it."

Just gotta laugh at this point. Then there was some stuff about the wood the J's old crib was made of, whether it would match "what I was planning to do with the room" and how she had chosen that particular type of wood because she hadn't known whether it would be a boy or a girl, and it would be good for either. This just confused me, as I didn't know that even wood was gendered.

Our human ability to stick anything into an arbitrary category still amazes me.

Anyway. They're also coming down today to see the new deck and meet the new cat. The house is a disaster, so I need to spend the rest of the morning cleaning. They said a mess was ok, but I don't really think they know whereof they speak in this case.

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