When one door closes….

… you turn the handle and open the door again. That’s how doors work.

Yesterday I went to a location to restock/swap out my soaps, but wound up pulling everything instead. Here’s the thing about my soaps; because glycerin is a humectant, it sucks the moisture from the air (which is why I shrink-wrap them, under the tissue paper wrapping). However, even a pinhole sized hole in the shrink-wrap can let in enough air that the soap will start to “dew”. That starts a chain reaction of the tissue paper soaking up the condensation (think of a cozy that you put on your beer on hot days), and that clears out the pinhole sized hole, which then takes in more moisture, and the tissue paper soaks it up, and so on and so on and so on. I’ve talked about this before, quite recently, as one of the reasons why I don’t do a lot of outside shows. Now, if we lived in Arizona….? But we don’t; we live in Florida.

So I looked at my soaps, and the amount I’d be taking back that would need to be at least unwrapped and re-wrapped, and at worst, unwrapped, remelted, reformed, and rewrapped, and I looked at the soap I was leaving and started thinking that unless there’s a massive temperature change, that because they leave the doors of this location open to the outside, that I would be swapping out this soap as well in a matter of weeks, and… I just couldn’t do it. Even if it’s only rewrapping everything, not remelting and reforming, that’s still time and supplies. So I made the decision to pull my stuff from that location for the duration of the summer, and we’re going to chat again in the Fall.

Until then, it’s a good thing I was already mulling over in my mind about new places or opportunities. I have a few ideas, involving the indoor craft markets mentioned in my previous post (linked above), and going back to Etsy and beefing up things over there, since even though I’ve for the most part outgrown it, I do already have a presence there and we are coming into the gift-giving season soon. So if I go back to Etsy for the Late Summer/Autumn/Winter, with the plans of not restocking things that sell out, I could put a lot of my extra stock there. And I will definitely be applying for GLAM again when that opens up, but a whole 10×10 booth this time, not just an 8×5 table. And while I said I never wanted to wholesale my soap, because it would be too hard on me to sell locally, sell online, and sell wholesale… if I’m not selling that much locally, perhaps I could look into wholesaling some of my Knitty soaps to yarn stores.

Anyway. I have more thoughts, but now I need to run to the airport to pick up Aunt Gay and Uncle Joe. Gotta run! More later!