I am unsettled, dear readers.I've been considering changing my business trading name from Cravings Frocks. That was an awesome name while I was doing maternity dressmaking, and clients didn't question it when I branched out to bridesmaids. But now that I'm doing craft rather than dressmaking, Cravings Frocks tends to confuse people.
This simmering thought bubbled over this weekend when I placed an order for new woven labels for my cushions. I wanted some which said 'W CLASS CUSHIONS', white text on black, to sew on the back of the cushion route numbers instead of my existing 'Cravings Frocks' ones. The price for 32 was $33, or 72 for $47. Seventy-two is an awful lot of cushions to make, but I didn't want to hit the big time, whizz through 32 labels then have to hand over more cash. I figured I could sew the W Class labels onto other tram-related projects as well.
As the weekend ticked by I started to panic. For a start, I don't really have $47 to spend on any non-essential business items at the moment. Secondly, how muddied was my identity going to become if I had Cravings on some things, W Class on others, and had the less intuitive one as my business name and URL?
To change my name I'd need to pay for a new business name - $81.80. I'm not certain it's worth the money. I've recently paid to renew my domain name (www.cravingsfrocks.com.au) for another two years, so I'd either be stuck with a new business name that didn't match my URL, or have to pay for a new domain as well - $32 if I remember rightly.
I've also got about 180 new business cards with my current business name - $26 or so. I don't want to waste those.
I really don't think the out-of-place business name is going to prevent sales. I even included all variations of 'W Class Cushions' in the meta tags for my webpage, so my site is still the first result if someone tries to Google me.
Maybe when my domain name expires again in April 2011 I'll pay to change everything. If I get mega successful before then I could take the cheaper option of registering a new domain name which matches my product, and leave my business name as it is. But while I'm still talking to potential customers face to face at markets, I don't think I need to hand over any cash.
In the end, I emailed the label place this morning asking if I could cancel my order. Luckily I jumped in early enough and my money's been refunded. Of course, now I wish I'd changed the order to only 32 labels and used them exclusively on the cushions. But I don't want to piss off the lovely lady who gave me a full refund.
How long do I have to wait before submitting a smaller order, without Lovely Lady thinking I'm an idiot? And why do I persist on caring what people I'll never meet think of me?
3 comments:
Oh boy. How very confusing and frustrating... not selling stuff means I've never had to think about these issues, and turns me off the idea of going down that path!! But you're probably right, unless you want to push to get really big there's little reason to change everything. If you did want to expand your 'brand' however and knew you just wanted to concentrate on W Class for the long haul, those costs would be worth it.
I think I'll miss the complicated part of the email and go straight to the Lovely Lady question. I'll bet she'd be happy to get a smaller order rather than no order any time.Besides I'm sure she gets customers ordering and canceling and reordering (and canceling?) all the time.
Oh yeah, at least now I get the Craving Frocks name -very clever!
What about Cravings Cushions ..... I hear you about the "branding" issue that you have. I guess it depends on where you see yourself going ...
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