Jesbags.blogspot is Jessie's Bags LLC: July 2016

Sunday, July 24, 2016

How to build an empire...2016

Building Jessie’s Bags …..

an empire or a multinational corporation…

Jessie’s bags had outgrown its current location, the lower level of my home. We have spread into the man cave (not my space) on more than one occasion. This has caused tension and stress in my household. So to ease the tensions 6 months ago we moved a large portion of the stored fabrics and supplies into an outside storage facility. This was good in one way it gave us breathing room. This was bad because it cost us $200.00 a month. And not all of the things we would need to work on were easily accessible being off site. Jessie’s bags has never been a money making project for us.

We have been doing this for 10 years and most of what we make is donated to breast cancer survivors. So to date there has been no real income. Recently we have tried to change that. We need Jessie’s Bags to become self-sufficient self-sustaining and have begun some creative ways to fund our program & workshops.

Our solution to the storage issue has been raise funds through go fund me.

While it was a good idea only a few

donated so we raised $305.00.

As we discussed the best use of these funds we came up with the idea of building shelving and my generous husband offered space in his garage area. He also offered us his carpentry skills.

We have an entire wall of shelves he built with Jessie’s bags specific needs in mind.

So the hard work began. This has been physically demanding hard work. We had to move all of the storage out of the rented space. Thank God for friends, who volunteer and own vans! We had to move all of the lumber for the project. We had to sort through and eliminate some of the fabric we have that will make the storage more manageable. And if we organize it along the way we can use the space wisely. Most of this work has been accomplished with the help of volunteer workers.

We spent an entire stay-cation week at home working on this. I was not happy about that! But now that we are ending the project I see the benefits of having done this building project in this way. . Exhausting though it has been we can now have things at our finger tips and we can find the fabrics we need. Jessie has been sewing all during this time. We will post the bags some of which we will sell to raise funds for additional storage supplies. Now we need totes to help us shift and relocate fabric to the shelves.

I’m thinking Jessie’s bags needs a truck or Van for transporting fabrics as part of our mobile community service program… we would love a customized vehicle that had sewing machines to and storage space. In a perfect world we would have this… and we could travel all over with the program.

For now in the real world we need sewers to help us process all of the fabric and create bags out of these supplies. Who knows Jessie’s bags might just be a multinational Empire one day…. For now it’s the garage for us….

Thanks to all the volunteers
for your support and help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!