These solar toys arrived today from our supplier. They are solar powered lucky cats who nod with their heads continuously. The toys are powered by solar energy and do not need any battery. Those solar toys are called Nohohon and are very popular in Asia. As they are still a very rare attraction in Europe/North America, they are a perfect gift for someone who loves cute things. Maneki Neko means Lucky Cat and is a very common character in Asia for wishing good luck, fortune and wealth. Below you can see 2 videos we took of our Nohohons and put them on Youtube.

orange Maneki Neko Lucky Cat Nohohon

golden Maneki Neko Lucky Cat Nohohon

set of Maneki Neko Lucky Cat Nohohons

Today is the 1st day of our newest addition to our team: Her name is Bonnie and she will work with us together in a fulltime position. So we are now a team of 3 fulltime staff. She will be responsible for packing all your orders and ship them. She will also take care of some office related work like scanning documents and pictures, helping with the wholesale catalogs, buying office supplies and other related work. Welcome to our team Bonnie!

me teaching Bonnie how to pack the orders

We purchased some new office equipment today as our new team member will start in a few days. We got a new laser printer (for printing shipping labels), a barcode scanner (for scanning the tracking numbers while packing orders), a network server (to share files between our 3 computers), 2 huge hard disks (1.5 TB each; one harddisk is for making a backup of the other one), wireless LAN adapter, mouse, COM port and extension cable I think now we are perfectly prepared for our new staff

New Office Equipment 1

Our 1500th online shop order was placed in our shop today! We are so excited here about this. The customer is from Wuppertal, Germany. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! to all our customers! You cannot imagine how happy we are that our hard work is paying off and our shop is getting more popular.

We ordered lots of new furniture from Ikea for our office last weekend and it was delivered by Ikea today. This is really convenient here in Hong Kong. For a small amount of money Ikea delivers all items to your home/office and even assembles them for you if you want. Alan loves doing this by himself so we only told them to deliver the furniture. We got 2 big tables which will be our packing table from now on, 4 more shelfs + a small table for taking photos of our products. We ran out of space on our shelfs because our products are getting more and more. The 2 big tables will be for our new staff to pack the orders + enough space for a computer for her. I will post some pictures of the new office and make a new office tour – video soon (I did a office tour video when we moved in last year:

WOW I never expected that. Our job vacancy post was approved by the Hong Kong labour deparment today and uploaded to their website. Now, we receive calls the whole day, people calling to make an appointment for a job interview. We also get lots of email job applications but most people call. We try to sort out the people most suitable and made some appointments for today already. Alan is conducting the interviews now. As the job interview is in Chinese, it is not important for me to join the interview. At the end of each interview I talk a little bit with each interviewee to see how their English is and to get a first impression of each person. Most people we interviewed so far are older, that means at least over 40 years old. As I am still in my twenties it is a bit weird to imagine I could be a boss of a person who could be my mum/dad (based on their age). I took some pictures of Alan while he interviewed a few people.

Alan is interviewing an older lady

another job interview

and the third job interview of the day

Our business is growing constantly and during the last 2 months our number of orders incresased significantly, therefore we decided it is time to look for help. We cannot handle everything by ourself anymore. We are 2 people working fulltime for this business but the amount of work is just too much. We need someone who helps us with packing the orders and other office jobs. The Hong Kong labour department has an online Job vacancies website and I wrote a job description for a fulltime warehouse clerk position and posted it online today. I hope we will find a suitable person quickly because we have so much work.