Brilliantly Boxed Blog

Brilliantly Boxed, Year 3

Jaime — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:58:41 +0000

Restructuring is the name of the game this year! With personal calendars that never seem to be empty, we are focusing only on teaching this holiday season. We have three classes scheduled through the City of Kirkland. While local craft and holiday bazaars allow us to meet a lot of other interesting folks, we just couldn’t fit in this year. Hope to see you at our classes!

Already Mid-February??

Jaime — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:28:26 +0000

Whoa. It’s practically mid-February already. We successfully completed our first year’s business taxes (thanks TurboTax!). We also had to pay sales tax revenues to the state - also pretty easy considering we kept excellent records of our, um, “revenues”.

Believe it or not, we have to get started planning for the 2008 holiday season next month. We have a new dimension to our business plan - auctions! The Spring is a popular time around here for them. We’ll be donating our services for many o’ good cause in the next few months. We hope that this will get the word out and kick-start a little bit of our “private consultation” side of our business. Between the two of us, we often end up at quite a few auctions as well, so we’ll see how it goes!

Holiday Hello

Jaime — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 06:35:59 +0000

Just a quick holiday hello before I return to the real world tomorrow. Today sort of officially ends the first phase of our business - the first holiday season! We learned a lot of things this year: mostly that big trade shows aren’t for us, but smaller local craft shows seem to be a lot better fit. Now, we get to spend January 1) figuring out our taxes (state sales tax and federal taxes, yay!) and 2) start scheming for how to make this a year round, and profitable, gig. Time for a quick update to our business plan! It was incredibly fun and empowering to even get this far and organized. Thankfully, we have it a bit easier since we have our full-time day jobs “to fall back on”. We have a lot of great ideas for next year that we can hopefully implement! We’ll be starting soon though, in order to plan better for next year.

It Started Early

Jaime — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 04:28:29 +0000

It started early for both Angella and I. First, notice that we are definitely children of the late 70’s/early 80’s. If the actual vinyl records didn’t give it away, notice the orange carpet in both of our pictures. These pictures will eventually make it to our website on the About Us page, in lieu of adult pictures. Kid pictures are much cuter and we won’t have to worry about being recognized on the street, due to our recent fantastic successes. I’m just kidding, there’s an entire entry coming up soon about about our latest show. We are definitely rethinking our business model right now!
Back to the pictures - these should probably have accompanied Angella’s post about Wrapping, Ripping, Tearing, and Enjoying. I look happy, but Angella looks perplexed. We’ll chalk it up to our respective different ages in these photos.
Lastly, my parents apparently didn’t own a 35mm camera until I was about 11. I reviewed an amazing amount of Polaroid (!) photos trying to find some appropriate pictures of our early start in all things beautifully wrapped. There were way better pictures of my younger brother than of me - go figure!

No Boxed Required

Jaime — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 05:51:16 +0000

Though our company includes “boxed” in the name, you don’t need a box to wrap a brilliant gift! Sometimes, unique or odd-shaped gifts provide a great foundation to get uber-creative. You might think I’m going to give you a bunch of fabulous ideas now and perhaps post a picture or two, but technology defeats me yet again. I wrapped a Starbucks coffee tumbler the other day for a gift exchange, took a picture of it, forgot to see if the picture actually turned out, gave the gift away tonight, then reviewed the picture tonight and promptly realized it didn’t do the wrap job justice. So, you’ll have to take my word on this one. Or visit this link - they do a pretty good job of explaining it as well.