Moving Soon!
BUT YOU JUST MOVED, RACHEL!!!
Yeah, I did. I had just moved into a new house. A beautiful house. I love this house. I've been here less than a year and I'm sad to leave it behind. But life and goals change. Pretty often for some people. I have recently separated from my long-term partner and so was in need of a big change.
That change is gettin' outta this tiny town and finding something cool and exciting!! On top of leaving Coos Bay, I'm also quitting my full-time job and doing this full time. Isn't that fantastic? I get to do art and stickers as a job. This was my goal around this time last year and it's utterly amazing that it's already happened for me. I wasn't expecting that for at least five years, but boy howdy you all have shown me something that I cannot ignore.
Success.
Love.
Support and undying friendship.
Thank you all for giving me these precious gifts. I owe it all to you.
For the next month or so, though I'll be packing, cleaning, doing garage sales and donating a lot of my stuff. I have less than thirty days to get my butt in gear. A lot of that time is going to be spent visiting with my family, too and so I'm extending my usual 3-5 day turn around time to 1-2 weeks. I also have a huge show in Texas during these 30 days. So just a heads up.
Thank you all again, for making this possible. We'll be settled back in in no time and be back up and running for some fantastic stickery business.
Much Love,
Rachel
See you at Tinley!
Happy Sticking!!
Rachel
Favorite? Comment? Going to A Show?!
Going to vend at the Portland Metro Reptile Expo this weekend. Yikes. I've been printing, cutting and sorting non stop this week. NON STOP. It's tiring. So tiring but so worth it. I get to meet my followers and fans of the shop first hand. I love it. Just LOVE it. So, if you're going please introduce yourself! I want to get to know all of you beyond the computer screen!
Much love!
Happy Sticking!
Rachel
www.happygeckostickers.etsy.co…
Our First Expo Success!
We've been busy busy busy for the last three weeks or so getting ready for the Portland Metro Reptile Expo! It's been crazy! Between late stickers, keeping up on gecko care for the herd, working full time and trying to draw up as many designs as possible before the expo I think I've lost my head somewhere! Finally things are beginning to slow down a little bit. Enough that I can cuddle more geckos now. Plans for the future are still a-go and while they are still big, we're tweaking them a teeeny bit.
The show itself was very fun. We had a lot of lovely followers come up to us who had found us on Etsy first! Thank you all for coming down and looking for us there! We wouldn't be anywhere without your support! We got quite a few new folks, too who were excited to see us at the show. Some really awesome feedback. We had a very successful first show and hope to continue the tradition and attend as many as possible near us. The next expo is in March in Hillsboro, Oregon. March 29th and 30th. It'll be a two-day show. While we'd love to attend, at the moment plans to be there are still a little bit up in the air since it's a two-day event. We'll know for sure by mid-February! This leaves us more than two months to plan for it. Hoping to have about 20 more stickers available by then.
Since so many people requested reptiles, we started a new plan for upcoming stickers. Bearded dragons are already on the list as well as chameleons, but the chams will definitely be brought on for February. We were thinking t hey'd be on a bit closer to March, but we wanted more variety and to meet the needs of more folks. Chams were a biiiig request.
TORTOISES! Wow! We got so many requests for tortoises! After the chams we're going to introduce some torts. We want to have them done by February, but with the chams in line first, we're shooting for early March. I was a little bit surprised that no one really seemed interested in our frog! Or even had no requests for them! (we have a tortoise voting poll going on right now on our Facebook Page! Vote for your favorite tort by commenting which you like best and would like to see the most!)
Some stickers we'll be discontinuing. Some morphs were not as popular as others. Our grey pinner crestie is one of those. We'll be discontinuing that little guy and revamping with a few other crestie morphs and a few morphs of the ball pythons will be joining us, including a blue-eyed leucistic and a pied. (Tell us what morphs you'd like to see!) Morph changes should happen about once every six months or so.
Snakes were pretty popular requests, too. We're working very very hard to reach all the snake fans. Colubrids, pythons, boas will all be brought on within the next four months. We're working diligently for you!
The more requests you make for animals you'd like to see the more helpful it is for us to gauge what would be popular for our audience. Thank you so much for everyone who attended the show and visited us at our table! It was a really fun amazing experience and awesome to meet people who were so very passionate and excited about our wares.
Streamlining the Shop
(This was originally published on our blog outside of deviantArt on January 14th 2014. We will be posting blogs here as well as on our regular blog from now on.)
Since our wares are getting more and more popular with our friends and followers, we've decided it's pretty important to stream-line our sizes and pricing and to include tracking on all our orders from you.
All regular stickers will be priced at $2.50 each and are available in one size. The price is based on how ten of them can fit on one 8 by 10 page. They are the biggest they can fit on one 8 by 10 page. Our mini sticker sets are priced at $3.00 each. They're totally random and pre-packaged in white paper envelopes so each set is a complete surprise. I love the mini sticker sets. I do think that they are my favorite thing in the shop.
For now, all our original printed stickers from November and December are on sale if they don't fall into the standardized sizing. That's great for you. They're going for pretty inexpensive so we can make room for more designs and upcoming prints and clear out the old stuff. (I use the term old lightly! We're still pretty new!) Our shop will be revamped completely here soon with the standardized sizes, better photography of our products and of course that new shipping method with tracking for your convenience.
Depending on how this upcoming expo goes in Portland on the 18th this month, we plan to head to other expos that are up to ten hours from the Oregon bay area. That includes California, Seattle, even Nevada in the next year or so. Let's just make a cheers for that, eh! Eventually, going farther would be the ideal thing! Just hop from expo to expo around the country.
On Monday we'll know for sure what the rest of our plans for at least six months are going to look like. Our tentative list now includes:
the Pacific Northwest Reptile and Exotics show in March
the Seattle Metro Reptile Expo in May
the Redding Reptile Expo sponsored by Critters and More in July
the Portland Metro Reptile Expo in August
possibly the Northwest Captive Breeders Expo in October depending on just how well things go. We'll be announcing every show we vend at on our Facebook page.
Below are a few announcements we made on Facebook, but I'd also like to touch on them a bit here:
Our shop will be going into "Vacation Mode" on Friday at around 5:00 PM PST. It will probably be a little bit after 5, because getting off work and editing the shop will not happen exactly at 5 PM. We'll be out of town for the weekend vending at the expo in Portland, and expect to open shop back up Monday morning.
We have changed shipping for our orders, too. Now, shipping includes tracking information to prevent lost orders in the mail. Shipping is also a little bit more with tracking, but loss on orders is nil. I would rather orders make it safely than get lost! That's never any good.
If there is a new sticker you have been dying to purchase and waiting patiently for them to come into the shop by the 20th, I'm going to be posting all the January debut stickers for sale for ONE day before the show. The 17th is the only day we'll be putting them up for sale until 5:00 PM PST or so. The 18th and 19th will be vacation days for the shop, so no orders will be taken on those days. Normal shop hours and activity will be opened back up on the 20th. January debut items are posted on our Facebook page. So take a look! We're taking all our sale-items to the show, so there's a good chance that these won't be available after the 17th, too.
If there's an expo you'd like to see us at, let us know! The more the merrier and we hope to be able to meet you at an expo local to you soon!
Happy Sticking!