It’s Not the Economy’s Fault

When people are getting laid off left and right, sales slow down, customers stop coming, stores start closing, people blame the economy.  We’re in a recession, depression, the sky is falling.

We always get asked by vendors and customers if this so-called recession has affected our business.   I’d say it’s yes and no.  As far as sales are concerned and demand for our products, no, it has not gone down.  It has actually increased.  If the recent trade show we exhibited at is any indication of demand for our products, it has grown by at least 50% from last year, which was twice as big as the year prior.  But as far as operations, it has affected us big time.  It’s harder to do business because creditors are getting tighter and suppliers aren’t willing to offer the same terms.  We had to learn really quickly to operate on cash instead of credit.   Employees are getting laid off at factories that make materials for our products and in turn affect the quality and timeliness that we get our materials and products.  We’ve seen a few wholesale customers close for business, but we’re still constantly adding more retailers.  We’re still “business as usual” around here.  I’m still developing new products, trying to improve our current line, trying to find better ways to help make our operations more efficient.  We’ve not cut back on advertising–we’ve not really done much advertising to begin with anyway.   But we’ve got A LOT of things in the pipeline that we’re working on.

It’s such a joy to come across vendors, suppliers and customers who don’t believe in what the media has been bombarding us with since last year.  These are companies that are also still operating business as usual.  They’re still around for a reason.

I think the most volatile businesses are those that just thrive on when the going is easy and customers are aplenty.  They’re the ones that don’t offer anything really extraordinary that you can easily do without them in a pinch.  These are the stores that survive on selling green circle widgets because it’s the IN thing to do.  When people start looking for blue square widgets and they have a stock room full of green circle ones, they either fold up or learn to deal with the situation by either stocking up on the blue square widgets, making the old green circle widgets look “retro”, or finding the red triangle widgets before everybody else does.  Now if you are a widget manufacturer, and there are a hundred others like you that make the same thing, unless you can make widgets better, faster, or are easier to deal with, chances are that your business has slowed down as well.  If you’re an employee, unless you’re really contributing something to the company that nobody else can do, your job is just as volatile.  Gone are the days when all you have to do is show up and do as you’re told.  Now you have to show up early, not only do as you’re told, but either ask or volunteer to do more –without asking for a raise.

Now isn’t the time to be just doing what everyone else is doing.  Now’s the time to be more innovative than ever.  Now’s the time to prove what you’re really worth.  If you, your job or business gets run over or kicked off over to the side, it’s not the economy’s fault.  It’s because you haven’t done anything to stop traffic.

Birthday Resolution

Many people do New Year’s resolutions right around the end of the year.  I tried that a few times and ended up just forgetting about what it was I resolved to do/accomplish 2 weeks into January.

Today, I turn 35.  I decided to do a birthday resolution.  And that is to be vegan before the end of the year.  That means no more eating any kind of animal product.  It’s not just meat, it also includes milk, cheese, eggs and seafood.  I’ve already started the journey about a month after Isabella was born, but I’ve not been consistent with it.  Lately I’ve been reading up more and have really immersed myself into this way of eating.  It has probably been 2 weeks since I’ve ate a meal with meat in it.  I still eat seafood occasionally.  But cutting out the meat in my diet has actually been surprisingly easy.  I actually feel a sense of relief to not have to consider meat alternatives for my meals.  I don’t mind anybody eating fried chicken or steak in front of me either.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I originally looked into being vegetarian for personal vanity reasons.  Over time, it evolved into doing it for health purposes.  Now, animal rights have come into play more than ever, and was probably the biggest reason I will be sticking with it for good.  Some may argue that animals commonly raised for eating (cows, pigs, chicken) don’t really serve much purpose other than to be eaten.  It doesn’t really matter whether that holds any truth to it or not, but with the way factory farms are raising these animals, and the health consequences eating them brings you, there really is no reason I should be eating them other than if I just craved for it.

I lost my craving for animal products after seeing some of these videos:

This one was really more inspiring:

Here’s to excellent health for the many more years to come!

The One Question Doctors Don’t Seem to Ask

My son has had this persistent cough for about a year now that seems to get worse whenever he comes back from staying the weekend at his grandparents.  I’ve made several conclusions on its causes from maybe he gets exposed to more cooties there, to maybe he just gets too worn out playing that his immune system gets taxed.  His doctor diagnosed his coughs as allergies and prescribed an over the counter allergy medication.  It worked for a while, and then it stopped working.  So I decided to have him see an allergy doctor to see what he was reacting to.  They did some tests on him, to which he came out negative for all environmental allergens.  They said he might be just mildly allergic to mold.  Yet they sent him home with a bag full of medication with complicated directions for administering.  After discussing this issue with other moms, the question about food allergies came up.  The allergy doctor never even got into this.  I looked up food allergies and ways to determine what my son might be allergic to.  To make a long story short, after careful observation, I’m suspecting he’s allergic to dairy. It’s been a few days since he’s had cheese.  So far so good, hardly any coughing at all.

Two weeks after his appointment with the allergy doctor, I got a letter from them stating the results of his allergy tests and that he’s a good candidate for allergy shots.  Allergy shots???  He was only mildly allergic to one out of the 20 environmental allergens and they’re recommending allergy shots???  When I did the same test about 2 years ago, I came up allergic to everything except dogs, and all I got was a nasal spray (which I never used).  I had my other son undergo the same test, with the same results and just got the letter from the allergy doctor.  I didn’t even bother opening it.

I truly believe the cause of a lot of what makes us sick is the food we eat.  Yet doctors never seem to ask their patients what they eat.  They just slap them with a prescription to take care of the symptoms they’re having.  Got diabetes?  Here’s 523 types of pills you need to take 73 times a day.  Have high cholesterol?  Add 53 more pills to that.  Afraid of cancer or the swine flu?  Here’s an untested vaccine that MIGHT prevent it.  In the meantime, go on with your merry lives eating burgers, soda and hot fudge sundaes.   They might tell you what not to eat if your case is really bad, and they might ask you what you had for lunch.  But they never ask you what you eat on a day to day basis.  Knowing what you’ve been eating for the last week or two will give a pretty good indication of what’s causing your symptoms.  Relying solely on prescription medicine to alleviate health problems is like constantly buying more expensive shoes while walking on broken glass.  Save your money and get off the broken glass!!

Most health problems can be solved by spending more time at the produce section of the grocery store, not at the pharmacy.  All doctors should know this.

Another Reason Why Made in the U.S. Kicks Ass–Insights from China

We get a lot of wholesale inquiries every week from retailers all over the world wanting to carry our products in their online or brick and mortar stores.  For the longest time, the only inquiries we always ignored were the ones that were from China.  Why on earth would someone from China want to buy our products at 6, 8 or even 10 times the cost of what they could spend to make it in their own country?   By the time our diapers reach them, after all the fees and shipping costs are in, they might have to sell our diapers for $30 a piece.  Who can afford that in China when most people only get paid a couple dollars per day (from what I’ve heard)?  We did wonder if they were just trying to get samples to knock off.  But that’s already happening anyway, so that couldn’t be the reason why.  A couple of retailers were really persistent and kept following up on their application even after my husband (who screens all wholesale inquiries) has already politely declined their applications.  Curiosity finally got the best of him, so he decided to ask them lots of questions to get to the root of why they really want to buy our products.  Their answers were far from what we expected at all.

Apparently in China, because of their one-child policy, most babies are really treasured and pampered.  An average middle-class household brings home about $1,200 per month, and approximately 50% of that is spent on the child.  $600 per month to spend on babies is a lot of money even here in the U.S.!  In most cases, there is no rent or mortgage to pay because the family usually lives with the grandparents, who also take care of the child while the parents work.  When asked why they would want to spend 10x the amount buying our products versus buying a similar product that was made in China, they said that most of the educated and wealthy people in China perceived products that were made in the U.S. as being the safest for babies.  None of that lead and melamine-tainted crap that’s been all over the news.  And since they were only having one child anyway, they don’t mind paying top dollar knowing that the product they are using on their child is of the best quality.  With our products being mostly made here in the U.S., it is a very attractive feature for those from China, and a lot of other Asian countries for that matter.

I thought that was really interesting.  I know a lot of moms here in the U.S. are tripping all over the bargain $3-6-made-in-China diapers, that are nothing more than just knock-offs of U.S. brands, that they get to score on Ebay and other places online, when a lot of people in China themselves won’t even touch that stuff to use on their own children.

What’s Your Excuse for Not Being Happy?

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