Why I’m Selling Face Masks

Aren’t you supposed to make baby clothes? Yes, I am definitely making baby clothes. This brand is still about making Bold Prints for Fearless Babies & Children, so why am I currently selling masks?!

“It really wasn’t on brand for me to wear boring, thoughtless pieces of fabric on my face.”

It started the way most things do with me, I wanted one. If you’ve been following my journey you’ll know I’ve been doing lots of self education around colour and applying this to my prints. One or two of these prints will be used for the first Mummy’s Muse collection. However I still love to work up different colour ways and see how they make me feel. Sometimes I even stick these colour experiments up on walls in the house, just so I can sit with them, look at them from different angles, in different lights, that kind of thing.

So once it became mandatory to wear masks pretty much everywhere, I did the same as most people and threw on a black or ‘surgical blue’ mask and got on with things. As I started travelling around a lot more and I saw these masks that lacked character staring back at me, I realised this isn’t for me. It really isn’t on brand for me to wear boring, thoughtless pieces of fabric on my face. I’m a person that wears lipstick on more days in a week, than I don’t.

That’s how it started, how’s it going?

Like so many accidental happenings, I’ve realised that selling masks has come with many other benefits I didn’t see coming. In the spirit of transparency, I make very little money on mask sales. I decided to opt for a method of production called drop shipping. Basically the masks are made to order. I felt this would be a sensible, and the most sustainable route. Let’s face it, none of us know exactly how long we’ll be required to wear masks for.

A drawback of this production method is that I don’t get to do a lot of the branding and experience stuff I have planned for the main Mummy’s Muse main product line. This is because my manufacturers ship the finished product straight to my customers. However, it did mean I could get up and running very quickly. Another positive is that I don’t risk falling into an inventory trap and thus tying up lots of capital.

Another unexpected benefit of selling masks is that it’s given me a platform to test receptiveness to different prints. I’m learning that drop-shipping / made – to – order is a great way to test different variations of products before committing to larger bulk orders.

Perfecting the payments process

The biggest benefit for me of this mask sale experiment has been perfecting the payments process. Like so many things, the best way I learn is via practical experience and not theory. I had all my payment processes set up…in theory. However, until I actually started to sell something and pressure test these processes, I didn’t know where things were missing and where bugs existed. It also helped me understand small costs that were missing from my cost models in terms of transaction fees etc

It’s also helped me realise some emails aren’t firing correctly in my transaction workflows. Again, things I thought had been set up correctly but I found it challenging to test until I had something to sell. I am very sure there are tests, dummy accounts and dummy products can be set up. This being said, I’ll be honest – these confuse me. I ‘get’ things most clearly when I experience them, or see them in action.