It’s Time for a Reset!

Hello Friends,

We hope you are well. We have a lot going on right now, and we'd like to chat with you about it a bit. We have been talking about doing a hard reset in our online shop. We have been talking about closing the website for a week and only doing tutorials and hangouts during our lives. This will allow us to clear the decks and do some behind the scenes maintenance stuff. We are planning for this to happen the week of June 9th-16th. 

During the trip home from Memphis, we had a conversation about how we’re not profit-motivated businesspeople. We know people who will try to squeeze every last penny from their customers and they penalize good customers with Draconian rules… and for better or worse, we’re not like that. That means we flirt dangerously close to the edge with our budget. Even more so since William’s other job burned down. There really is no cushion anymore. 

So, it’s scary to imagine stopping selling everything for a week. 

We have all these systems we want to implement to improve shipping times and workflow for us. During the trip, we also talked about how hard we push ourselves and that it isn’t sustainable long term. Andrew kept circling back to the phrase… “everything has a price”. 

When William had his first AFib episode, we realized in a very real way that that price was our health. Andrew doesn't want to end up like his dad who worked all his life with the hopes of retiring one day only to get sick and die. His parents' one big splurge together was to get a new refrigerator. He did hard, manual labor for over 40 years with only a refrigerator as a reward. Neither of us want that. 

The idea behind the hard reset is to clear out all the current orders, remove sold out listings, change some settings, play with the shipping options to maybe get cheaper international rates, and basically start fresh. (It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the general idea.)

This will coincide with our studio overhaul. While William is working on shipping and computer stuff, Andrew will be doing manual changes at Star Cottage Studio. This means lots of organizing and moving furniture around and getting to a place where everything has a home. The studio has become a catch-all and it needs a good refresh. 

We've heard a rumor that some people think we’re closing and that is NOT true! We do want to consolidate things, streamline them, and make them more efficient. We believe the reset will be a good thing. 

To ramp up the temporary closure, we’re going to have sales and play knock out with some categories of items we’re no longer interested in carrying or can no longer get. It’s going to be expensive to close because we still have bills and other obligations. Again… scary! 

But a reset is really needed for us to catch our breath and do work we normally don’t give ourselves permission to do. 

Naturally we are excited, but also nervous!

If you'd like to help us, we hope you'll consider purchasing from our RESET sale. You can save 25% off everything currently in our online store using the discount code RESET. We'll also be having amazing deals during our live broadcasts each weekday evening (at 7:30pm ET)—like our recent "Name Your Price", “Total Request Live”, and “Weird and Wonderful Sale” events! So, whether you prefer to shop online or hang out with us live, we'll have lots of deals for you! All sales during this period will help us to get through our week of no sales to do this big reset. 

Thank you so much for reading and for your support and understanding. We are so grateful for all of our friends and family here in our community, and we know this reset will help us to continue to serve you better for a bright beady future! 

Your friends,

Andrew & William