As I mentioned before here, we are switching to a new software to handle our products, customers, orders and a lot more. We tested this new custom made software for one month now and we are ready to turn off the old one. Bye bye Afterbuy! We won’t miss you Our new software is going to make our life a lot easier and will even make it possible to ship orders faster! How? The post office closes at 5pm, so the last orders can be packed at 4pm. With this new software, we can get the latest paid orders to our shipping department just before 4pm and therefore ship them on the same day. Before, we couldn’t do that and had to ship those new incoming orders the next day. And now it is time to turn off the old software and use the new one! YAY

We got some new designer fabrics from the USA today. The fabrics are from Robert Kaufman and are absolutely lovely. The prints include owls, ice cream and cute reindeer with red noses. The reindeer fabric is especially suitable for Christmas and comes in 2 colours: red and blue. The owls fabrics are from the “On a Whim” and “On an Whim 2” collection by Amy Schimler. We have those fabrics in different colours available in stock now.

light blue owls fabric by Amy Schimler

cute owls fabric from the On a Whim 2 collection

USA designer fabric with a yummy ice cream print

Christmas fabric with reindeer and red noses

Our bento boxes are getting more and more popular and therefore we decided to add some new bentos to our shop. We got some adorable new cute bento boxes in today. There are new bentos with bears, pigs, frogs, cute animals, donuts and more in yellow, pink, blue, red and green. Those bento boxes are great for kids to bring lunch to kindergarten or school, or for adults to office. We even got some matching cutlery sets. If you have a company and are interested in our bento box wholesale deals, please contact us by email.

Japanese bento box with cute bears

kawaii bento box with bears and colourful donuts

pink piggy cutlery set

cute frog bento box

blue bento box with bear family

A delivery of new Re-Ment items arrived at our office today. We got the following collections: Am I Dog?, Fairy Tale Tableware, Bread & Butter, Sweet House, Premium Sweets, Teddy Bear’s Housekeeping, Little Twin Stars Charm, Little Twin Stars Starry Sky Party, Hello Kitty Ouchi Gohan, Sanrio Candy, Hello Kitty Stationery and Sushi Mascot.

Sanrio Candy set

Teddy Bear

Fairy Tale Tableware set

Bread & Butter Re-Ment set

Hello Kitty Ouchi Gohan set

YAY YAY YAY we got our 3,000th order in our shop today! We can’t believe how popular our shop is now! Thanks to everyone for your support, your recommendations to your friends and family and more! Our 3,000th order is from a nice lady from Magnolia, Texas, USA. Thank you! We promise we will keep working hard on making this shop the cutest shop with the most kawaii products on the internet!

This month I am busy testing our new software. Until now we used a software from Germany called Afterbuy to handle our product database, customer database and our orders. As we were growing bigger we got to the limits of this software. We decided at the beginning of 2010 to change to a new software. We tested different commercial software for 1 month but couldn’t find anything suitable for us and our business model. Therefore, Alan, my husband, who is a very experienced programmer, started to program a custom made software for our business. It was a very big decision for us because we are only 3 people working fulltime for this business, me, Alan and one packing staff. So one person spent his whole time on programming and I had to take over managing the business which was growing significantly the last months. It was really hard work but Alan finally finished the software at the end of July and we started testing it this month. As there are still lots of bugs and changes, we have to run both software at the same time which means double work for me. But we plan to shut down the German software at the end of this month and only use the new software. I can’t wait for this to happen because it will make a lot of my work easier, faster and more efficient. I would like to thank Alan for this great software! THANK YOU!!!

We received some new cute stationery from Japan this week. We got memo pads, letter sets, stamp sets and even some really kawaii chopsticks. I just love opening those boxes from Japan full with the cutest stationery and other goodies. It’s like Christmas all year long Here are some pictures we took:

kawaii stamp set with bunnies

cute chopstick sets with Alice in Wonderland

panda bear letter set

matryoshka memo pad

Alice in Wonderland notebook from Japan

We got lots of new products and therefore had to expand our warehouse space. A huge load of Tenshi Neko, Akuma Neko and Mimori bags arrived the other day. We also received lots of new Japanese fabrics for the coming Autumn/Winter 2010 season, including some really cute Halloween and Christmas fabrics from Japan. Our packing table was also upgraded and packing is more efficient now. We put a whole shelf on the table for all the envelopes and plastic bags. On top of the shelf is a bubble wrap roll fixed,  so our packing staff can easily pull down some bubble wrap for packing. I took some pictures after we finished setting everything up and looking tidy again. Have a look at the pics here:

our new packing table

lots of new Japanese fabrics

Tenshi Neko, Akuma Neko and Mimori bags

We already started selling this year’s Halloween fabrics and Christmas fabrics in our store modes4u.com. Luckily, some of our suppliers have some really awesome fabrics with cute prints this year so we immediately ordered them. Most of the fabrics are Japanese fabrics with, for example pandas dressed as Santa Claus, matryoshkas dressed as witches, cute reindeers, colourful mushrooms, candy and cookies and many more. Halloween is coming soon, so make sure you order your Halloween fabrics in time for this fun day. And Christmas will be here sooner than we realize So get your kawaii Christmas fabrics quickly for some cute Christmas projects. We would love to see what you make with our fabrics, so please send us your pictures to our email info@modes4u.com.

Japanese fabric with beautiful Christmas print

Michael Miller Christmas fabric

pink fabric with pandas, bunnies and bears dressed as Santa Claus

cute fabric with Santa Claus, macaroons and other candy

kawaii Halloween fabric from Japan

kawaii Halloween fabric with matryoshkas dressed as witches

cute animals fabric with Halloween theme

arrival of our Japanese fabrics

We received another order of Japanese fabrics from Cosmo Japan. This time we got this year’s Halloween fabrics and Christmas fabrics already! We are very excited about them because they are just uber-cute and it is so hard to find kawaii Christmas fabrics and Halloween fabrics from Japan. In Japan Halloween and Christmas is just not that important than in Western countries. Here are some of my favorite fabrics:

cute pink Christmas fabric from Japan

Japanese kawaii Christmas fabric

cute Halloween fabric with matryoshkas

fabric with kawaii animals dressed up for Halloween

super kawaii fabric with panda bears and mushrooms

white Alice in Wonderland fabric from Japan