A Little Update of My Life

Guess what? The new semester has begun...again! Where did the time goes? Sigh....During the shortest term break ever I cut lots & lots of fabrics for custom orders, finished some and still sewing.

This also means I already received my first semester results (which I've tweeted but recording here for my girls to read one day). Not too bad. I got 2As, 1A- and 1 B+ with a total of 3.813 CGPA, alhamdulillah.... After a long and hard look at the effort I put in last semester and what I managed to pull off, I feel, deep down in my heart, that I COULD get straight As if I focus 100% on my MBA and not sew at all. Could I?

Perhaps I should stop taking custom orders altogether and only offer ready to ship items. You see, I love custom orders mainly because you don't gamble what would sell and what wouldn't. You only produce what the customer actually want to buy and this saves costs. In operations management this is called the Pull system. It's part of lean manufacturing concept adopted widely by Japanese corporations. I discovered that this is the BEST system for even the smallest scale production ie. the business model of most home based sewing/craft business.

BUT if I stop taking custom orders, the game is ON. I like the idea of having full creative control of the designs. The best part of sewing to me is choosing the fabrics, mixing and matching. I can't do this with custom orders. And what most customers don't realize is there are tonnes of fabrics that do not look as pretty in pictures but once sewn & creatively mixed with other fabrics, stunning! However, the downside of this is, being a one woman operation, I can't be producing the same design, one for every sizes. I could only pray that what I produce will be snapped up by someone with a  child of the correct size & there will be the inevitable emails from customers asking me to sew one more of the same design in a different size and I usually don't have the heart to say no...

But of course I could not do it at all, you might say. Close the biz and just sew for leisure! Okay my answer to that is : My girls don't need 200 dresses lol! With all the fabrics in the previous post, I WANT to sew & sell my creations.

Tsk. Decisions, decisions....any thoughts ladies?

This semester I am taking 3 subjects with an additional experiential business training program which is very exciting yet taxing. You'll find me not replying your emails or texts till late at night every Monday & Tuesday. I'll write more about this in the next post.

Before I go, some eye candy of dresses sewn by yours truly. Have a gorgeous day girls *hugs* :)