Search Results for: www.brambleberry.com

Yes, They did Break the Window

March 7, 2008 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

In my Sampler a few months ago, there was an amazing Letterpress Notebook from Chronicle Books in San Francisco. Upon receipt, it was love at first sight and I took my notebook to everywhere – to every meeting, every event and even grocery store shopping. The paper is thick and luxuriously fine grained, and the cover design unique and eye catching.

And then, disaster struck… when the notebook was 3/4 fill of maniacal scribbling (business ideas galore! To-Do Lists overflowing! The next million dollar idea!), my car was broken into. Alas, the beautiful purse/briefcase that was stolen held the esteemed notebook (and my checkbook, all my Christmas gift certificates, our wedding photos and Otion’s tax forms for Q4 to name a few other items in the purse).

I was incredibly disappointed at the entire experience but the irreplaceable loss was the notebook. Hoping to recapture the magic, I have three more notebooks on the way right now. After all, you never know when that next great idea will come to you. You can scurry over to Chronicle Books and get your own Hammerpress Superfine Notebook for $9.95.

Fresh Baked Bread

March 7, 2008 Filed Under: Bramble Berry News

According to the trivia question of the day from local station, Praise 106.5 FM, the smell of bread baking is the favorite scent of men and women alike. This article in the Oakland Tribune echoes this assertion.

Bramble Berry has a delightful Fresh Baked Bread fragrance.It’s absolutely amazing in scrubs and I can’t wait to try it in candles soon.

Lucky Shamrock Soap

March 6, 2008 Filed Under: Melt & Pour Soap

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day which is coming right up, I’ve designed a fun St. Patrick’s Day, green themed, soap project. You can find other St. Patrick’s Day inspirations, including more molds and colorant ideas here.

You’ll need:

2 pounds, 8 ounces clear melt and pour
8 onces white melt and pour
Milky Way Shamrock Mold
Loaf Mold (ours aren’t ready but I have 20 made up in a slightly too flexible plastic if anyone wants them for $17 each. Just email me at info -at- brambleberry -dot- com to get it)
Opalescent Green Mica
Iridescent Glitter
Emerald Green (Shamrocks on top)
Non-Bleeding Oxide Green (Shamrocks on bottom)
Fragrance: Lettuce or Green Tea is perfect!

Pyrex Container
Spoons
Rubbing Alcohol in a Spritzer Bottle

Instructions

Step 1: Make the Shamrocks. Be sure to fragrance them. They end up making up 20% of your total soap in the final product. We used Emerald Green (which bleeds) and Non-Bleeding Green Oxide.

Step 2: If you allow the Shamrocks to sit overnight, be sure to cover them in an airtight container. The more fresh the soap is, the easier it is to adhere in the final product.

Step 3: Heat 8 ounces of clear soap in the microwave. Stir thoroughly until it is no longer steaming and there are no chunks. Fragrance this soap with .1 to .2 ounces of fragrance oil.
Step 4: Pour the clear soap in the bottom of the loaf. Spritz each Shamrock down with rubbing alcohol. Embedd them at an angle to allow air bubbles to flow up the sides. The loaf mold holds three Shamrocks easily.

Step 5: Allow a thick skin to form. Pour a layer of white soap to really make the shamrocks pop.
Step 5.5: Then, it’s time to swirl! Using 2 to 4 ounces of colored soap per pour (don’t forget to fragrance), swirl and layer varying green. We used Emerald Green, Irridescent Green, and White melt and pour to get the final look.

Step 6: Allow to harden to a very thick skin. This layer needs to support the next layer of soap and three Shamrocks! Pour a thin layer of Clear Soap (colored with Iridescent Mica).

Step 7: Spray each Shamrock liberally with rubbing alcohol. Gently set each Shamrock, face up, into the thin layer of soap. Pour remaining soap around the Shamrocks, filling the soap so that the Shamrocks are just barely set into the surface of the soap.

Step 8: Do one final spritz of rubbing alcohol and allow soap to harden at least four hours or overnight.

Check back tomrorow for the final photo to see how this fun loaf turned out.

Soapmakers Weekend Intensive

March 5, 2008 Filed Under: Bramble Berry News

Limited to only 12 people, this weekend class in Bellingham, WA will cover basic and advanced lotionmaking, Melt and Pour (including how to make the soap pictured above) and Cold Process soap.

Hands on classes taught by experts in the field will make this a packed weekend, full of products to take home and new skills to build your crafting business with.

Guest instructors include: Debbie from SoapyLove, Alicia Grosso, author of The Everything Soapmaking Book and Paula from PJ’s Soaps. I’ll be teaching the beginners classes first thing Saturday and Sunday morning so that our talented guest instructors can build on these basic lessons.

Class starts at 9 a.m. and goes until 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Lunch and light breakfast, including coffee, will be provided both days. Early bird registration is $250 for the whole weekend. We already have one person signed up so there’s just 11 more slots!

To learn more, head to Otion’s website here.

I Wrote, count ’em, Five Cards!

March 5, 2008 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

I wrote five “Great to meet you!” cards yesterday for the Shop/08 panelists and cool chicks I met at the event. That means that I get to buy replenishment cards!

These are the limited edition, linoleum block print cards that I purchased. They’re even hand signed, and numbered, by the artist. I might just frame one and put it up in my house. The artist, Ronna Richmond, only makes 10 prints of each design so these are very original and special.

You can buy your own set of limited edition, linoleum block print cards by Ronna here. She’s only got a few sets left.

Sugarelle Shout-Out

March 5, 2008 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

Just had to crow about the cutest latest little indie find from the Lemming Sampler. Sugarelle is also having a 30% off sale right now so if you need some adorably cute sugar scrubs, check out Sugarelle. They definitely stick to their core competencies and have one line of products: sugar based products. It’s a nice marketing hook – focus on one thing and do that one thing really well.

Closing the loop from this shout-out, I used my $14 Etsy Splurge Carrot Seed/Rose Absolute bar this morning. It smelled earthy and wonderfully sophisticated in the shower. The lather was dense and small and my skin felt soft and moisturized (without having to use lotion) after the shower.

Finally, there is a good blog post hereabout the benefits of finer grades of olive oil (in cooking). It’s worth a quick read if you’re a fan of olive oil in food.

Tick Tack Toe

March 4, 2008 Filed Under: Melt & Pour Soap

Look at all the options available for these cute cut out soaps! The secret is to always use non-bleeding colors and make sure that you have both clear and white soap on hand for contrast.
The textured background soaps were made with either a cheese grater or very thinly sliced layered soaps to create interest and depth in the background of the cut outs.

Follow the entire project and make your own spring cut out soaps here:

Day 1 – Set Up
Day 2 – Making the Flowers
Day 3 – Marbling
Day 5 – Embedding the Flowers

Visa and MasterCard Rules in Business

March 4, 2008 Filed Under: Bramble Berry News

I recently read a great letter to the editor in the Puget Sound Business Journal. The letter, written by Emery Shrock in Milton, WA, discussed the stranglehold that Visa and Mastercard have on all businesses (and especially on internet-based businesses). In part, he said:

As a longtime retailer, I find the discounts and feed charged to the merchant gradually rising – not because the card issuer’s costs are rising, but because they can get the higher fees, and the merchants can’t do much about it.

Bramble Berry’s fees have risen exponentially in the last 10 years, routinely topping 4% of the transaction if the customer is using a premium card or particularly lucrative reward card.

Visa announced in 2006 that it would go IPO and be a publically traded company. Mastercard is already a publically traded company, selling at over $200 per share, with most analysts saying it will outperform the market in 2008.

Well, at least someone’s making money off of my $4. And, it might as well be me … next time I save $1000, you can bet I’ll be looking into buying shares in this monopoly.

Shrock also singled out the difficulty in dealing with fraudulent cards, by stating:

The rules are set up so that the merchant generally takes the fall for accepting a card in good faith that proves to be a fraud. The fraudlent transaction is simply charged back against the merchant, who may be penalized by higher fees if he has too many such “chargebacks.”

This is also true in our case. At Bramble Berry, money for a charge will be withdrawn from our account before we even get the paperwork. Fighting chargebacks is time and labor intensive, in part because our card processor doesn’t give us the name of the customer, only the amount of the transaction and the date that it cleared the customer’s account. Finding the name, pulling the internet order, the accounting version of the order, and the credit card slip, the Fed Ex delivery signature and then writing a long essay on the fact that the customer received the products, at the address that the bill goes to, does not ensure that we will get our money back. In the 10 years I’ve been accepting Visa and Mastercard, I do not recall winning one single chargeback – even the one where the local police actually got involved and charged the customer with fraud.

Sadly, I don’t see a way around this. PayPal (which we started taking at the end of 2007) fees are higher, the system byzantine and difficult to work with and is not a legitimate version of Visa and Mastercard in terms of reporting ease. No one pays with checks or money order any more – why would you? Visa and Mastercard are much more convnient.

But, someone’s paying for this convenience and it’s not the consumer – it’s me. The vendor. At a rate of $4 for every $100 I take in.

Shop/08 Crave Show Report

March 3, 2008 Filed Under: Bramble Berry News, Business Musings

I had the privilege of speaking at the Shop/08 Crave business panel this morning on “Turning your Passion into Profit.” Speaking to a full house (there were even seats on the sides of the room as more women signed up than there was room) was a thrill. Speaking to a group of female entrepreneurs was even better – contagious energy. The video below shows the view from the stage.

Founder Melody Biringer started Crave in 2000 out of a desire to have more quality time with gal pals. Since then, it’s blossumed into 6 major CraveParties per year, StartUpJunkie, Crave Parties, three written books, Shop/08 and founded the Seattle Ladies Who Launch. She is one busy lady!

My fellow panelists were very cool. Larisa has a company called “Dreamclinic.” They specialize in massages – specifically the best massages in Seattle. Having won numerous awards to prove it, Larisa is passionate about providing a massage that gets results. In fact, while she and I were chatting before the panel, a woman came up and raved to Larisa, “Your massage therapists are the only ones in town that get rid of my migraines every time.” That’s some endorsement! Larisa didn’t start out as an entrepreneur. She worked in high tech but was so interested in natural and intiegrative medicine and therapies that she chucked it all and started a massage therapy practice out of a one room rental. That has now turned into a full time job with 16 massage therapists. With her MBA, she is uniquely positioned to turn her passion into a business. You can hear her speak about her positive entrepreneurial experience on the Dr. Pat show here.

Rachel from Real Card Company specializes in invitation – custom invitations to be exact. She also does letterpress (be still my beating heart) cards and wholesales them to vendors across the nation. By far the most interesting-sounding part of her company is designing custom invitations. She told me some amazing stories of custom invitations while chatting before our panel started. The textures, color and overall messaging of the invitation sets the stage for parties, weddings and birthdays even before the event starts. Customers trust Rachel to really “get” the feeling that they want to invoke for their event and Rachel enjoys the challenge of designing the perfect invitation to start that ball rolling. She’s been lucky enough to do this for over 20 years. Her longevity in a business that she is passionate about was an inspiration.

Some of the questions asked of us by the moderator and the audience ranged from:

What did your family think when you started your company? (Horrified but loving and supportive)

Did you have medical and retirement in the early years? (No, and if you want daily stability in your financial life, perhaps entrepreneurship isn’t the best choice for you.)

Do you still get to make soap/do massages/be creative with paper? (Not so much; every minute is filled with daily minutia. But I make soap in my spare time!)

How do you finance a business? (Credit Cards. Probably not wise.)

What’s your best advice? (Continuous learning. Surround yourself with books, magazines and people that augment and fill in massive learning and experience gaps)

Shop/08 for Indepdant Businesses was a very good experience. I was honored to participate in this fun, educational, empowering event.

Reason 1948 to Avoid Travel

March 3, 2008 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

The Lufthansa flight LH44 from Munich experienced wingstrike while landing at Hamburg on 1 March 2008 during Emma storm. My husband who has his pilot’s license said, “Those are some major crosswinds. That is one skillful pilot!” Nobody was injured; the plane landed using another runway. Coming off my “Washington State to NYC and back in 24 hours” marathon, this film makes me shudder.

Note to Feedblitz subscribers: You can see the video in your email. You’ve got to click through to the blog to view it.

Cupcake Notecards

March 3, 2008 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

Look what I bought last night in a fit of impetuous silliness – more note cards (shocker of shockers). But, unlike my usual Etsy letterpress splurges, these are cupcake prints. Awwww …

Buy your own set of cupcake notecards here.

I just got back from the Crave Shop/08 show. I’ll have a round up of the event for you, complete with photos and hopefully video, later tonight.

Cut Out Soaps – Embedding

March 2, 2008 Filed Under: Melt & Pour Soap

Day One – Set Up

Day Two – Making Daisy Cut Outs
Day Three – Marbeling Option

Embedding soaps is best done with fresh soap. The more moist and glycerin laden that the soap is, the easier the embedded soap sticks in the soap without separating.

Embedding the Daisies

Step One: Melt clear melt and pour soap in the microwave on short bursts. Stir to ensure all the pieces are evenly melted.

Step Two: Fragrance the soap. Remember, yellow or orange fragrances are fine to use but may make greens and blue colors not show up as clearly as you want.

Step Three: Pour a thin layer of soap into the bottom of your basic shape mold. Make sure that the soap is not steaming. If you cannot easily put your finger in the soap without burning your finger, it’s not ready to be poured for embedding. This is what happens if you pour the clear soap too warm.

Step Four: Spray the surface of the clear soap with alcohol. Insert the daisy flower at an angle. If you place your flower down flat, air bubbles can easily be caught under the flower, marring the beautiful look of the soap. The angle allows the air bubbles to flow up the side of the flower.

Step Five: You can pour clear soap over the back of the embedded daisies and have a clear, see-through bar. Or, you can wait for the clear soap to harden (about 10 minutes) and move onto Step Six.

Step Six: After the clear soap layer is thick enough to support a second layer, spritz the clear soap with rubbing alcohol. Then, pour a contrasting color. Opaque soap backs are particularly nice to show contrasting spring colors.

Step Seven: Finish your second layer off with a final spritz of alcohol.

Check back tomorrow for final photos showing color and option variations.

United – Where Pay Doesn’t Match Performance

March 2, 2008 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

I promise to post the next part of the Springtime Cute Cut-Out soaps today and get back to regularly scheduled soaping projects! But first, one more ranting United indulgence.

I got up early today with the intent of crafting a letter to United about my bad experience. When I was researching the UAL Board of Directors (yes, John H. Walker and James O’Connor, you’ll probably get a letter from me too), I found a bunch of information about United. I find it interesting from a business standpoint (especially with Bramble Berry’s commitment to fanatical customer service). You may find it totally useless. If so, thanks for indulging me.

United might have the worst customer service in the industry. Or maybe not. It depends who you ask. According to JD Power & Associates, they’re about average. University of Michigan disagrees. Their surveys found that United did indeed have the worst customer service in the industry with the highest dissatisfaction rates.

United is the 2nd largest carrier in the world, with some of the youngest planes of any fleets in operation. United does over 3,600 flights per day with over 55,000 employees. I wouldn’t plan on flying much of January 2010 since the entire United employee group (pilots, mechanics, engineers, flight attendants) is up for a contract negotiation.

Brace Fredric, the CFO of United, keeps selling shares (like crazy!). One does wonder what he knows. Or maybe he just has a kid in college to pay for. The Chairman of United, Glenn Tilton, doesn’t seem like a bad guy. After all, he serves on the board for an after school non profit program and a museum in Chicago. Then again, he did work for the gas and oil industries for years (Chevron Texaco and Dynergy). No word on whether he was the Chairman of Dynergy before or after they were accused of massive fraud and corruption. He was in the top 500 top paid executives in 2006 and the highest paid executive of any airline, despite losing massive amounts of shareholder money, in 2005. His total stock return % to shareholders during his entire tenure at United Airlines? A whopping 0%. He’s been paid over $11million dollars over 4 years to lose money, go into bankruptcy and return $0 to shareholders.

Passengers complain, a lot, about United. They had the highest number of customer complaints per 100,000 passengers in 2006. The most recent, February 2008 reports (covering the year 2007) on United show that only 66% of their flights arrived on time in 2008. Ouch! 8.8% of United’s flights actually arrive late over 70% of the time. Only carrier American Eagle beat United out for this um, distinction. They cancel almost 7% of their flights, putting them 4th in that category. Compare that with Delta who only cancels 2.2% of their flights. Graham Atkinson, the Chief Customer Service Officer, for United certainly has his work cut out for him.

Between October and December 2007, there were 937 other travelers on United that were forced to give up their boarding passes and bumped. A full 16,380 were voluntarily relieved of their boarding passes (volunteering to give up their seats for some sort of travel voucher). Presumably United was so thrilled with their record in this area, they managed to come in 5th in “Involuntary Denied Boarding Pass” contest for 2007, kicking 4,448 people off flights.

United’s competitive spirit was in full force for December 2007, when they handily outpaced every other airline in the entire industry with number of customer complaints with a full 16% more passenger complaints.

That’s one dubiously bad achievement. Here’s to hoping that 2008 will be a better year for United and its customers.

Non-Stop, Direct or just Not?

March 1, 2008 Filed Under: Personal Ramblings

I already was miffed with United for the not-so-non-stop Flight 315 from La Guardia to Denver and onto Seattle.

When I checked into my flight yesterday, I learned that Flight 315 was delayed by one hour. That turned into two hours; then, three hours. Worried, I checked with the gate person to make sure that all was okay to fly from the Denver to Seattle leg. The gate agent informed me that, “No, you definitely won’t make that connection.”

The gateperson graciously gave me a seat on Flight 409 from La Guardia to Denver and switched my Seattle leg so I would make the connection with minutes to spare. They even gave me an exit row.

We boarded. I made friends with my seatmates. I even told the guy in Seat 9B that I was getting really lucky with my seat assignments and that “I had good seat karma.” The captain told us to belt up, the flight attendant shut the door and we got ready to fly.

I surreptitiously popped a Xanex. I’m a nervous flier and a little bit of anti-anxiety drug keeps me from running down the length of the plane, shouting at the top of my lungs, “What are you people doing in this tin can flying 700 miles per hour? Don’t you know that this is crazy and unsafe? Surfing the wind in this tube is dangerous!”

The pilot made his announcement that the door was closed and we’d be taking off. Then, there was a pounding in the closed little exit door window. All of us in the exit row looked at eachother nervously. Someone in row 10 said, “Well, you guys are the exit row. You’re supposed to know how to operate that thing.”

Finally, a flight attendant came. There was some gesturing and then, he opened the door. And in popped a nervous little man in a United uniform, who started yelling at me to “Get off the plane! You never should have been given this seat! Get off the plane!”

I looked around. Surely, he couldn’t be talking to … me? Out of all these people, he’s yelling at … me? Why me?

“You’re not Premier! You’re not Premier! You never should have been given this seat. Get off the plane. Now! Go!”

My seatmate said, “I don’t think you need to do that. You have a ticket. You have a boarding pass. I don’t think you have to go.”

I looked at the gate agent and said, “Do I HAVE to give you my seat?”

While I’m still not sure if I had to give up my seat, my preference not to get arrested got the better of me. I got my bags and followed the gate agent up the gangplank. Standing at the top of the gangplank was the man that I was being kicked off the flight for. I looked at him and said, “Are you really kicking me off this flight?” He stood silently, accepting that his Premier status gave him the right to arrive 45 minutes late for a flight and still demand that he get a seat.

Meanwhile, the United gatekeepers tried to put me on a flight to Chicago. Given that Chicago was boxed in with snow and storms, this was either dumb or just an attempt to to placate me long enough for the gate agent to make his escape.

After many more hours in various airports, I finally got home to Seattle. Over the course of the night, passangers watching the original drama with the Premier Member and my seat came up to me and commiserated. Their opinions ranged from, “Sucks for you. That’s what you get when you don’t fly enough.” to “Wow! That was so cool! I’ve never seen them actually pull a plane back for anyone. I wonder what that guy does!” Most passengers agreed that United was one of the worst carriers in the industry.

I have to say that I agree.