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

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.

We purchased a new cutting tool for cutting our fabrics faster and more efficient. As our number of fabric orders increased significantly over the last weeks, we decided to order a professional automatic fabric cutting tool. We fixed the tool onto the floor because our floor tiles are exactly 0.5m wide, so they are perfect as a measuring tool for our fabrics (all our fabrics are sold in 0.5m increments). The fabric cutter is very easy to use. It is electrical, so you only need to turn it on, put the fabric correctly over the metal blade and push it slightly and it cuts the fabric perfectly and clean. It is so easy to use, you can cut the fabric with one finger only! What an improvement to our previous manual hand fabric cutter. I took some pictures of the tool below, so you can see how it looks like (the counter is counting how many fabrics you cut on that day):

our old hand fabric cutter

our new 'toy': an automatic fabric cutter

closeup of the fabric cutter including counter

Today we received an email from a magazine in Germany who would like to publish one of our pictures. The magazine is a Psychology magazine and funnily they plan to write an article about bento boxes and how to prepare a cute lunch box. They wanted to use one of our bento pictures to show it in the article. We are really glad that our shop is getting more popular and even magazines and their editors are starting to be interested in our products.

Today we finally received our new business cards. We were bored with our old business cards and designs new ones. The background pictures used are Japanese fabric patterns by Kokka. We will add to every order one of those super cute cards. I hope everyone likes the new business card.

business card front

business card back

We were contacted by a German seller who is organizing a special promo bag auction on Dawanda (the German version of Etsy) for a charity project called “Atmenreich”. They take care of children during the day who have respiration illnesses (lung etc.). Of course we agreed to join this project as it is for a good cause. We will sponsor some of our Japanese fabrics and send it to the seller. They will then sew some cute bags with those fabrics and fill it with lots of cute things from other sellers in Germany. These kawaii promo bags will be sold in April on Dawanda.com. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that this will be a successful charity project.

we are mentioned on the first page of the flyer as the fabric sponsor (name: Kawaii-Planet, our Dawanda shop)

the list of all the other sellers who join the charity promo auction

We are back at work today. We had a great Christmas holiday and enjoyed the time with my family a lot. But now we are back at work and with lots of new ideas and plans for 2010. Expect a lot of new products, offers and sooo much more. We will be busy packing for at least a few days now because we accumulated quite a big number of orders during our holidays. I hope everyone’s package will arrive quickly. Let’s have a fun, cute and successful start into the business year 2010!

We send everyone all the best from Austria! I hope you have a great New Year 2010 and may there be lots of cute things happening I added some photos from our stay in Austria again. We booked a private plane to take us to the Austrian and Swiss mountains for a great view. It was snowing the night before heavily and on the day of our flight, it was a perfect sunny day so we could take lots of great pictures of my home. Enjoy!

beautiful Lake of Constance, my hometown Bregenz is right next to it

bird's eye view of Lindau, Germany, the island in the Lake of Constance

the Austrian Alps: beautiful and breathtaking

Wanna go skiing? It was a perfect day for doing that.

me on the plane being super happy

Alan was the Co Pilot

and one more pic of the gorgeous white mountains