Signs, Banners & Decals…Oh My! (Part 2)

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all had fun yesterday and on NYE — I did, surprisingly; I caught up on all the movies I’ve been wanting to see (Avatar truly is amazing!) and got to go out to eat with family and friends. It’s so strange to be in 2010 with a new decade in front of us. If you’re my age, then you probably changed a LOT in the past 10 years and will do the same in the upcoming 10 years. For me, the next decade is crunch time because there are so many things I want to achieve career wise. And it’s probably quite obvious what my goals are for this year (I don’t do new years resolutions); to make my brick and mortar shop successful and keep up the momentum with my online shop.

The first positive change for the new year is my signs. I posted a couple of weeks ago about the decal I had made, and how it came out too small. Well, I put it up on the wall over my space and here’s how it looks:

Hmmm. It’s a little dinky, no? If it were about double that size it would look AWESOME. Well, actually in person it looks awesome too, but just on a much smaller scale. Dali decals does good work, and in a couple of months I’ll probably order one that’s a bit bigger. But this will have to work for now.

When I was putting my other decal in the window a couple of weeks ago I realized how much space we had in the back window for a banner. So I promptly ordered one from HalfPriceBanners.com (I think? It was either them or EmpireBanners.com, not sure) and they sent me back this wonderful 4′x2′ banner:

And it only cost $18 (plus $8 shipping). Let me tell you, that’s an AWESOME deal. All the local places I checked with wanted to charge $50-$100 for something similar. Of course it was a bit of a risk ordering something from the internet when you’re not familiar with what kind of work they do, but I took the risk and it paid off in a BIG way. The banner looks so pretty in person, it looks exactly like my business cards and they even got the gradient background in there perfectly. It’s also made of a durable fabric that can be used inside or out, and they gave me free grommets as well.

Actually, ordering the banner was the easy part — hanging that thing was a pain in the rear end! Mainly because I had to search all over town to find suction hooks to hang it on and it’s fallen down about three times. Each time I’ve had to drag this giant ladder out from the back, climb up it feeling like I’m going to topple over, lift up the blinds and get covered with dirt and dust. And on top of that the suction hooks from target don’t hold very well. But it’s been up for about 3 days, which is a new records. Fingers are crossed that it sticks….literally.