Author Archive: Kevin on The Fresh Daily

Ali and I just got back from trick-or-treating with Payton. It was a perfect Halloween. Cool, crisp air. Orange, red, and yellow leaves strewn about and a couple of neighbors that are really into Halloween. Payton was Snow White this year and I might be biased, but she definitely achieved maximum cuteness. We got all of the usual goodies: M&Ms, Snickers, Twix, Licorice, Milk Duds, and my personal favorite, NERDS. Lucky for me, at only 17 months, she’s not allowed to have much candy.

Our first trick-or-treating

I hope you all had a great Halloween. Now, onward to Thanksgiving…

Today, we’re back to adding new gemstone beads AND we’ve continued to expand our chain and findings sections!

Huge Rainbow Fluorite

“HUGE” seems to be the theme of the gemstones Ali has chosen to add this week. There are quite a few large rondelles and rounds. There’s also some good focal material like new jade carved pendants, lapis off-center donuts, and a yellow turquoise carved oval pendant. If you’re looking for an inexpensive accent bead, we’ve also added a couple of rounds in the $3 range that should do the trick!

16mm etched jump rings

If you’re lucky enough to have been on vacation for the past two weeks, you’ve missed the biggest expansion in Lima Beads history. For the first time ever, we added chain, findings, and a huge selection of metal beads to our site. This week, we’ve continued the expansion with new styles of chain, crimp beads, and some cool jump rings (check out the 16mm etched ones!).

We’ve got more to come! Between now and the end of 2009, you’ll be seeing new gemstone beads almost every week, lots of new chain (especially sterling), more metal beads, more findings, and…. wire!   Stay tuned

If you’re an avid Lima Beads fan, you know that we’ve been talking about adding chain, findings, wire, and more metal beads for years!

As far back as I, Ali, or Steve can remember, we’ve always spent the majority of our time focusing on our line of gemstone beads. We wanted to build a line of stones we could be proud of and we all feel really good about what we’ve done so far, but it is time to expand. We wanted to expand much sooner, but as many of you know we just moved into a new building and our old office space made it impossible to add new products lines.

Lima Beads has chain!

We’ve spent over a year researching and quality testing chain, wire, findings, and metal bead lines. We’ve chosen a lineup that we know we can be proud of and that we feel will be a great addition to the Lima Beads family.

In the coming weeks, you’ll be seeing thousands of new items, including:

• Over 100 styles of chain in 5 different metals
• 1000’s of metal beads
• Findings, such as: earwires, headpins, eyepins, leverbacks, clasps, links/connectors, bails, lobster clasps, etc. in sterling, copper, and gold-filled.
• A full line of TierraCast beads and findings
• Wire
• A wide variety of metal beads and charms

But, is Lima Beads still going to be focused on gemstone beads and its other product lines?

Yes! Have no fear, we have big plans for our other lines as well. A huge load of new gemstone beads is on the way here as I’m writing this. Ali tells me that we also have some crazy cool new designs on the way from Green Girl Studios.

With that, we all take a big, deep breath (ahhhhhhhh) now that we’ve gotten the ball rolling on these lines.

Let us know what you think as we continue to add items!

After 1 huge moving sale, lots of painting, tons and tons of beads and shelving units carried down the stairs, 1 broken down moving van, a long battle with the phone company, and lots of excitement watching our new building come together — we’re back!

The First Load

It was 2 weeks ago today, when Steve told you that the moving sale had started and we were starting the move to our new building. A lot has happened since then. The last two weeks have been the biggest, most fun, most important, and most stressful in the history of our little company. When we moved into our old space 5 years ago, Lima had 3 shelves of beads and no idea of what was to come. I think it’s safe to say that we didn’t understand how much we’d grown until we set out to move all of our stuff

On that Thursday 2 weeks ago, we put the moving sale on our web site and shut everything down to move. On thursday night, all day friday, and all day saturday, we focused on getting all of our product and its shelving to our new building. It went pretty well, except for one small thing. Steve borrowed a moving van from his friend and it broke down. We had to hurriedly call Uhaul to find out that they had one truck available, so we grabbed it!

Starting to pack orders

We took Sunday off because we were all quite sore, but we were back in on Monday. We had only planned to have everything shelved by the end of Monday, but because everyone worked so hard, we were actually able to start packing orders on Monday afternoon. The moving sale was an overwhelming success. We had almost 5 times as many orders to ship out than we normally would on a Monday. We got them all shipped by Wednesday as planned (a miracle) and since then, we’ve just been trying to get settled. This blog post is the first work I’ve actually done at my desk since the move started and it feels great!

We’re incredibly happy to be in our new space. The contractors aren’t quite finished with our kitchen yet, but everything else is finally up and running. As promised, there are exciting things to come now that we have room to grow! I can’t give away all the secrets, but within the next 6 weeks, you should be seeing 5 of the following 8 things for sale at Lima:

• Lots of chain
• Full line of Tierra Cast
• Lockets (awesome lockets)
• Sterling & gold-filled findings
• Chainsaws
• Murano glass beads
• Tires
• Refrigerators

It’s a new day at Lima! We have an adequate space for the first time in a long time. It’s going to allow us to expand our product offering, be better about keeping things in stock (yes, I’ve been getting your emails ), do more fun and interesting things and continue to grow and provide what I hope is awesome service to you!

Here are some photos from the move:

The first moving van

Steve pulling up in the Uhaul that saved us!

One of many truckloads...

Getting back to work

The kitchen coming together (slowly)

As always, thank you for your support and for taking this wild ride with us. It’s about to get even better

Kevin

In case you missed my post back in June, Lima is moving! It’s something we’ve needed to do for a very long time, but kept putting it off. Who would want to move tons (literally) of stones, cz, pearls, and metal? We finally broke down and got a new building…

We’re all very excited and tired. We’ve been going over to the new building after work to get it ready for the big move. Steve, Matt, and I were there until midnight last night painting the conference room and the break room. The owner of the building is also doing a lot of work to prepare it for us. Two more weeks and we should be in! I know what you’re thinking… when is the moving sale??? It’s soon. We’ve been so busy that we haven’t had time to prepare the beads for the move. Once we do that, we’ll know exactly what we want to put on sale. It may come as a ton of first come, first served items, because we have a lot of things with small quantities that we just never ended up selling I’ll keep you posted! Here are some photos of what’s been going on at the new space for the past couple weeks:

2 new offices taking shape

We had to dig a trench for the kitchen!

Steve standing in what will be our new kitchen

Playing on the scaffolding

Stay tuned…

For today’s Fresh Daily Deal, we’ve chosen a green vein jasper tumbled nugget. If you’re not familiar with our Fresh Daily Deals, check out my original blog post about them.

As I mentioned last time, now that we are moving into a new space and starting to pack up all of our belongings, we are finding beads we didn’t even know we had! Ali and I were digging around in the order checkin room last week and we found these great little green vein jasper nuggets. This is an interesting stone. The base is a dijon mustard color and the veins are a forest green color that seem to glow from the inside. This tumbled nugget is one of my favorite shapes too because of its versatility and variation. Each one is different!

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One week ago today, we launched The Design Gallery. Matt, Steve, and Ali worked hard on it for about a month because a lot of people had been asking for a feature to share designs. We finished it up, Steve put up a blog post called The Design Gallery is here! and we crossed our fingers that: 1. it would work and 2. people would like it.

Corpse Bride by Wickwire Jewelry

Well, that was a week ago and so far, the gallery has functioned properly (for the most part) and there are already 270 designs uploaded, so I think we know the answer to #2 as well I can’t believe the awesome designs that have been shared so far. I knew that we had some talented customers, but to see the actual photos makes us really happy. So far we’ve seen cool combinations of stones, incredible wire work, custom made beads, symmetrical designs, asymmetrical designs, large focals, small focals, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, sets, and more!

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It was almost 3 long months ago when I wrote about how Lima was Shopping for Space. After a long search and looking at what felt like every office/warehouse space in Ann Arbor, we have found the perfect space!

On the About Lima page, we talk a little bit about the kind of work environment we like. We definitely don’t want to be out in a boring warehouse in the middle of some industrial park, but we’re also getting a little too big to be in our downtown loft. For the past 5 years we’ve managed to grow every year with no elevator, cramped spaces, and bathrooms that are showing their 70 year old age. We set out 6 months ago to find an office space that would give us the convenience of a warehouse environment (large open space with an overhead door) and the “coolness” of a loft/downtown that we have in our current space.

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Back in March, I announced that we would be doing Fresh Daily Deals from time to time. We’re ready for round 3 and this time we have a large coral nugget! If you’re not familiar with Fresh Daily Deals, check out my original blog post.

We’re starting to dig through the many boxes in our office in preparation for our big move (more on this later) and we’re finding all sorts of good stuff! I found these nuggets buried in our receiving room. Tons of people have been asking or coral lately, so I thought they’d be a perfect fresh daily deal. We don’t want to offer them as a regular item on our web site because we probably can’t get them from the factory now.  I only found 73 strands, so get them quickly if you want ‘em!

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The spring craft shows/fairs have begun. We’re in the midst of graduation and wedding season. There are lots of birthdays this time of year. It’s spring, everyone wants new jewelry! This is the time when the beading world is usually buzzing with activity, but it seems a little quiet this year.

My questions is — what are you seeing out there? Whether you’re selling at shows, having home jewelry parties or trunk shows, or getting requests for graduation jewelry, what sort of designs are people asking for? We try to keep up on the latest trends, but they’re all over the place this year. I think the economy is driving people to use supplies that are a bit less expensive like: brass stampings, recycled parts, and base metals. Ali tells me that the items below are being reported as “hot” for this summer, but doesn’t it seems like a huge variety? I’m not sure what to think.

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I have some exciting news today. If you’ve been following along, you know that in 5 short years Lima Beads has grown from a couple of shelves in a college apartment to what it is now. This rapid growth hasn’t given us a lot of time to concentrate on efficiency, implement standard procedures, or stay very organized. I guess the best way to put it is: for the past few years, we’ve been flying by the seat of our pants!

That’s all about to change. We’ve never had a real manager here — the management of daily operations has been something that Ali, Steve, and I have all shared. Lima Beads has reached a major turning point. This summer, we want to add several new product lines, get a new space (stay tuned for an announcement very soon), and we have a lot of fun ideas for the web site. It was obvious, to make all of this happen, we would need a manager and we found one. Today is Cathy’s first day. She has more than 10 years of real management experience. She is going to help us grow larger, be more efficient, more organized, and more fun! We couldn’t be happier.

Cathy’s bio and photo are below. Please join us in giving her a big welcome. This summer is going to be awesome. We’re so excited. You’re going to see lots of new products, lots of fun things on the site, and a much less stressed-out Lima team

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We’ve recently received the most delicious looking product sample ever — Murano glass beads. If you’ve ever shopped for a glass anything, you’ve surely heard of Murano.

The island of Murano is located just off the coast of Venice. Since the 13th century, some of the most beautiful glass in the world has been produced there. Most of the beads are still manufactured using the lampworking technique, which was invented by a Murano glass master in the 1700s.

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Back in March, I announced that we would be doing Fresh Daily Deals from time to time. We’re ready for round 2 and as promised, we have some African Green Jasper this time. If you’re not familiar with Fresh Daily Deals, check out my original blog post.

The Fresh Daily Deals

These deals will be available through Wednesday April 22nd. After that, they will be removed.

African Green Jasper Heishi 6mm

16" strand: $5.84 (33% off!)

This expired on April 23. Watch for more deals soon!

African Green Jasper Rice 30x10mm

16" strand: $9.93 (32% off!)

This expired on April 23. Watch for more deals soon!

African Green Jasper Thin Pillow 14x10mm

16" strand: $6.72 (24% off!)

This expired on April 23. Watch for more deals soon!

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Ann Arbor is an old college town. Most of the buildings downtown (including ours) were built in the mid to late 1800s. This means: narrow hallways, steep staircases, no elevators, and lots of character. The character part is what keeps us downtown. Most companies that do any significant amount of shipping and receiving have moved into one of the industrial zones that are 4 to 5 miles outside of the city. Downtown is full of galleries, jewelry stores, musicians, coffee and book shops, students, and any kind of food you want. The Lima team thrives on this energy, so we’d like to stay downtown if we can.

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Introducing Fresh Daily Deals! There are great deals on Brazil sodalite beads at the bottom.

With a handful of our suppliers, it seems that our requested strand quantities are regarded only as suggestions. We request 50 or 100 strands at a time and when the order shows up at The Lima Loft, there might be 500 strands! When this happens, we have a decision to make. Do we keep these extra strands or do we send them back? Often, sending the strands back means shipping them all the way to a factory in China or somewhere else in the world. Since the cost of that is great, many times we decide to keep them all.

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If you participate in any of the internet social networks, you’ve no doubt see everyone makings lists of random facts about themselves lately . The fun thing about these random facts is that these are usually things about yourself that your co-workers and friends wouldn’t even know. In my case, I had forgotten about most of these things until I actually started to think of random facts about myself. We thought this was fun, so below, you’ll find 10 random things about all of the Lima Team Leaders. Add your 10 random facts in the comments!

Kevin

1. My first job was “Kevin’s Lawn Service” when I was 10.
2. In the 7th grade, I trained all summer for a US/Canada swim meet and then broke my arm on the monkey bars the week before the meet.
3. I love Karate Kid and Back to The Future. A lot.
4. I tried to break up with Ali in high school and she wouldn’t let me. Thank God. I was such an idiot.
5. My favorite sport to play is hockey, but I don’t skate very well.
6. When I was 9 I lost my wallet with $2 in it. I was devastated for weeks.
7. On my very first day as a lifeguard when I was 15, I almost drowned saving someone.
8. I know all there is to know about both grandfather and cuckoo clocks.
9. When I was little, I built an alarm for my closet out of string, wire, tape, a Sony walkman, tin foil, and some old speakers.
10. I had to write an interview paper in college, but I didn’t have time to interview someone, so I made up a fictional person. I got an A.

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For the next 2 weeks, we’ll be adding awesome India-cut stones to our shop. Some of you will know exactly what to expect when I say India-cut, because there are specific stones that are typically cut in India and they are cut in a distinctive way. For those of you that aren’t familiar with these stones, I wanted to write a bit about them, because we love stones cut in India!

The Gemstones

multi-color moonstone

India factories cut many gemstones, but the ones you see most often are the “premium stones” — stones like: labradorite, peridot, ruby, garnet, emerald, moonstone, fluorite, opal, iolite, and tanzanite. These factories cut these stones to give them an awesome, unique look that you just can’t get anywhere else.

labradorite faceted rondelle

The Cuts

Many of the premium stones above are now being cut in China as well, but you can always tell when a strand has come from India. The factories there have a distinctive cutting style. Many of the stones are hand-cut rather than machine cut. This results in varying shapes and sizes rather than a perfectly uniform strand of beads. If you ask us, it adds a little character to the beads

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Ali and I had our first date on February 3, 1996. We were in high school together, I was a senior, she was a junior. We had a nice date, said goodnight and I went home. The next school week passed without my calling her and we rarely crossed paths in school during the day. The following weekend passed, still I didn’t call her. It’s already been discussed many times that this was STUPID on my part, so trust me, I know what you’re thinking…

By the time February 13 arrived, I finally realized how dumb I was and redeemed myself by asking her out for Valentine’s Day. She said yes and well, the rest is history. I found out later that in the time between our first date and my eventual call, she told all her friends I was a big jerk and that she’d never go out with me again even if I did call. She must be all talk because it only took her about 3 seconds to say yes to a second date

Ever since this first Valentine’s day redemption date, we’ve always celebrated the day. I’ve always liked Valentine’s day. I remember in elementary school, for the first 2 weeks of February, the students ran a “post office” to deliver valentines between the classes. I wasn’t exactly a ladies man in elementary school, so I never got many valentines, but my mom always came up to school and sent me one through the post office to make sure I had at least one to open.

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I need a vacation. Not just a weekend getaway — a no cell phone, no laptop, no worries, walking on the beach, napping in a hammock, sipping a less-than-manly tropical cocktail kind of vacation.

On the ferris wheel, Navy Pier, Chicago, 2004.

5 years ago this June, Ali and I were married. Our wedding was in northern Michigan in a town called Sutton’s Bay. We only had time for a short 4 day honeymoon in nearby Chicago. On the way from our wedding to Chicago, we came through Ann Arbor to stop by our apartment and pack up the few Lima Beads orders that had come in over the previous 2 days. We drove them to Chicago with us and mailed them from a downtown post office. This was our last real vacation and we feel like we still need to go on a proper honeymoon.

We haven’t taken a vacation since then. It’s been 5 long years filled with hard work, home remodeling, and having a baby. All of those things are wonderful and we’re very thankful for them, but now we’re ready for a nice vacation! I don’t even know where to begin. Lima Beads is still a pretty small company, so we can’t be away for too long, but I think we could manage 10-12 days. Living in Michigan, we would love to go somewhere tropical during the winter months. During the summer months, we’d like to visit a place where we can be surrounded by nature and hike, camp, and bike.

What are you favorite vacation spots? Any suggestions for us? Photos to share?

We haven’t made any solid plans yet, but we need to do something in the next year or I think we just might go a bit crazy.

Christmas is over. New year’s eve and new year’s day are over. Now, it’s just cold and snowy for the next 8-10 weeks and glimpses of the sun will be few and far between. In Michigan, we call this period the grind. I must admit, I occasionally have a hard time keeping a positive attitude during the grind. As Ali can tell you, every year I start talking about how we need to move to northern California where my sister lives or to Florida where her sister lives.

For those of you that live in colder areas, the midwest in particular — what do you do this time of year? Does anyone else experience the annual desire to seek a warmer climate? I’ve messed around with various winter sports, but nothing too serious. I’ve always thought that if I were to ski or snowboard on a regular basis, I might enjoy the winter more. I used to love playing pond hockey, sledding, or having snowball fights when I was younger, but I haven’t done those things on a regular basis for quite some time.

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