Starting a business because you had no storage is no easy feat. Turns out until now time had been the main factor holding us back. Turns out, being in lockdown for COVID-19 means that you have more time on your hands, and as such, we could finally give this a red-hot crack.
Fortunately, Graham and I are both IT geeks, Graham’s skills lie in the back-end design and mine in the front-end design. Graham set up our website and shop.
We then set about registering our business. Unfortunately, Glass Ceramics was taken by a tile shop, so GLASS Ceramics Studio was registered.
There was a lot of trial and error around the shop interface, the website, the payment portal, and the shipping component.
Next came the decisions around how we were going to ship our pieces. We chose a courier and then set about buying packaging and a stamp so that we could customise our boxes. I didn’t realise there were so many different box sizes to choose from! We ended up writing an algorithm to work out the optimal box sizes we needed to buy.
The entire family was involved in getting our pieces cataloged and online. Our sons were involved in taking all the photographs, dimensions, and weights #homeschooling at its finest!
By now, we had a registered business, a website, a shop, and packaging, we were ready to go live! It turns out neither of us is all that social media savvy, so it took us a bit to set up Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
It was nerve-racking to go live, “were our pieces good enough?”, “Would people like them?”, “Are we wasting our time?”, but there was no way to know the answers to those questions without taking the leap.
On the 11th of April, the adventure of GLASS Ceramics Studio began.
Visit our shop to see our pieces.
