The feeling of completion

Ahhhh….I love the feeling of completion. I finally finished switching the website over. I'd say it looks pretty good. There are still a few things that need work, but only our "website guy" can fix. He works on our website only part-time so it may be awhile till we actually get it truly finished. Here is the website link for a quick look if your interested, experiencethevillage.com/store

We have received some copies of the catalog and it looks sooooo good! I mean not to toot my own horn (toot, toot), but it looks great. It's a piece of work that I actually feel incredibly proud of. We've been talking about doing this catalog from day one and the fact that it is already completed, with hard copies in hand, kind of makes it almost indescribable. I can't wait to show all my friends!

On another note, a few of Anne's friends have flown in from New York City for her wedding on Saturday. Tomorrow they are coming by the store to look at the catalog and are actually going to take a few samples back to the their buyers. This could possible be our first account….cross your fingers for us that the buyers will like our products and want to place an order!! I'm keeping the company name private for right now. Although, I'll keep you posted if anything happens:)

Maybe now I'll be able to sleep better that all this is finished………mmmmm no, probably not. That's just wishful thinking haha

Peace friends-

Pages

Opening letter

Back cover of catalog

Recycled Paper Necklace (from Kenya) layout

African Print Dress (from Kenya) layout

Beach Bag (from Kenya) layout

Bottle Openers from Kenya

Freshwater Pearl Necklaces from Thailand

Large Raffia Hat from Kenya

Front cover of catalog

Here are some examples of the pages from the catalog! I was responsible for designing the catalog cover and the overall design layout. Molly Longest was responsible for editing all of the photos. Anne and Emily supervised and edited the catalog. If you look close to the fabric swatches, you can see the color names that Kelsie and I came up with---they're cute! I created all the pages in Photoshop, then saved them as a JPG and placed them into InDesign. The entire catalog is 26 pages from front to back. The catalogs will be ready to be picked up on Monday the 9th. I can hardly wait. Being held responsible for such a huge project at TVE has truly been an amazing experience.

Photo Scenes

The past two days at work Molly and I have been working on the scenes/pictures for the catalog. On Wednesday, we drove all around Indianapolis looking for places to shoot some pictures. We have actually scheduled our photo shoot next week with Julia. We want to make sure everything runs smoothly, therefore we are scoping out the places beforehand where we think will be the best shots. Molly took several practice shots of the all the places so we could see what they would like. She wanted me in a lot of the pictures--just to see what it would be like with a person (of course they did not turn out so well---I'm not a photogenic person by any means lol).

We found some beautiful places in downtown Indy such as the James Witcomb Riley House and Lockerbie Street. Lockerbie Street is amazing---you don't really feel like your in downtown Indianapolis. It has cobblestone on the street and the trees curve inward, similar to what you would see in Savannah, GA. Many of the houses are very old with beautiful architecture. There are several old run down buildings, which is will be great for our catalog. Our concept is a beautiful dressed up model with an old vintage look in the background. The rough/pretty contrast I guess. Yesterday, we actually went back to downtown to take some pictures of just the products. We are trying to get this catalog finished by the first week in August. We do not want to waste time when we will be with Julia, therefore we decided to just go ahead and take somes pictures to get the ball rolling. I'm going to run to Cosco today to get some of the pictures printed---I'll post some of them later today!

Along with the pictures, Anne and I are still working on the pricing. I brought in my scale today to weight the products. We are trying to come up with an average at how much something will cost per pound. Once Anne comes in, we will continue to work on the pricing.