We have a YouTube channel where we posted a few videos about our office, work and products so far. Today we got our first subscriber! I know that’s nothing really special but I thought it’s a good occassion to mention our YouTube channel here on our blog. Here is the link to our YouTube channel: modes4u YouTube channel We also uploaded a video we took in Tokyo, Japan. We plan to take more movies of our products and our work and upload them on our channel. Please let us know if you have any suggestions what kind of videos you would like to see!

our YouTube channel

We ordered some more shelves for our office so we can expand our warehouse space and stock more products. We totally ran out of space and had to get more shelves. I took some pictures to show how hard we worked today

the first few new shelves are standing

we plan to expand our fabric section

all Kutsuwa products (DIY clay sets) got their own shelves

after we finished: the fabrics have more space now and we are ready to receive the next fabric orders

more space for our Kokka fabric bolts

part of our stock + the packing area

me working on my desk (on the left side is Pui Chi, my sister-in-law who was making buttons in that moment)

Hong Kong has finally it’s own Google Streetview version and of course we had to check it out and browse through our neighbourhood, our home and our office area. If you are interested where our office is and how the area looks like, you can have a look here. The first streetview shows the back entrance of the office. The 2nd streetview shows the busy main entrance. When you look up you can see our office. Turn around on the 2nd streetview and be ready for a surprise . Can you find it?

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

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

OK, so finally the day has come: Alan started working at my office today. I wrote about this before on this blog post: My husband quit his job. He quit his fulltime job to join my business selling cute things in our online shop www.modes4u.com and other channels. His first big project will be programming a software tool to help me adding new items much faster. We have a big problem with that because we get new items all the time, often a few times per week but it is very time consuming to put them one by one into our database. Therefore Alan started writing a software program to make this process faster. This will also help us to make our shop much bigger because we will be able to order more often. I can’t wait to use his tool.

Welcome Alan, have a good start working for our business and Good Luck!

This morning I saw a truck bursting into flames right around the corner of our office. I passed the truck while I was on the bus as it just broke down. There was some white smoke so I thought, it just overheated. When I walked back from the bus stop to get to my office, I saw the first fire engine arrive and black smoke coming from the front of the truck. I went closer to have a look and the truck just started to burst into flames. It was crazy, the truck was in the middle of a busy street and they had to block all lanes during morning rush hour. The fire got quite big and burned out the whole front of the truck. I took a little video while I was standing there, check it out:

Some people asked me to add more pics of the office after our move was finished. So I took some pics today in my office and you can see them below. As you may recognize, there is still some empty space. We plan to buy some more shelves as we are buying more and more products and expand our stock. We will also buy 1-2 tables for my husband to work here and for taking pictures of our products.

this is my table where I work

some of our shelves filled with products

our new office, still being a bit empty

Today a very good customer from France visited us at our new office. They placed a few orders already and wanted to finally meet in person and discuss future collaborations with us. I also showed them some items from our showroom and they took them with them to show to their customers. My customer is a buyer for big companies like Carrefour in France, therefore this business opportunity is really great for us and them as well. I am really looking forward to keep working together with them in the future.

We moved during the weekend to our new office which is just 1 floor below our old one. So it was quite easy and not too much work to carry the things downstairs but still lots of packing involved. And I hate packing! I rather unpack and organize the new office than pack the things in the old office. Therefore my husband did the packing and moving and I did the unpacking. On sunday his family showed up and helped us. That was so nice. They said “We are family, of course we help” in their broken English I just love them. Below you can see some pic of our new office while it was still empty. I also added a video of the office which also shows the very nice view we have now.

our new office space

great view from our office

We invited everyone for Yum Cha (= Chinese tea lunch/dinner) after finish moving

my husband & me in the restaurant enjoying some good Chinese food

I signed the contract for the lease of a new office last evening. Wow, it happened so fast. My husband’s auntie, who is a property agent, called us a few days ago and said that there are some offices available in the area of our current office. Of course I agreed to check them out in the hope to get a better deal. And I really did find one. It is a bit smaller, but the area is much more useful because it doesn’t have a long corridor like the current one (which just wastes space and therefore money). The standard is much better because it was just renovated, so everything is new and clean. The whole office is very bright and I have a great view over Kwai Fong. It’s cheaper too And the best part: the new office is just one floor below the current one, but facing a different direction!!! How cool is that! We only need to move one floor down. I can’t wait to move into the new, bright office at the end of this month.

Here you can have a look at my new office:

this is my new office