21 Shoestring Marketing Secrets That All Small Business Owners Need to Know | Manta Marketing Center

21 Shoestring Marketing Secrets That All Small Business Owners Need to Know Manta Marketing Center

Luxury Beauty Products: The Carolina Bee Company ~an interview

Our own Carolina Bee COmpany has been interviewed! Read about them here!!Luxury Beauty Products: The Carolina Bee Company ~an interview: I have the good fortune to be great friends with Todd and Monica, owners of The Carolina Bee Company. Their knowledge of beekeeping is i...

Artist Spotlight: Lynn

It's time to resume my artist spotlight series.This time I am featuring Lynn, a wonderful painter of all kinds of things! She comes across as this very sweet lady, soft spoken and always polite. Little did we know that she is a fighter and is now a breast cancer survivor! She perfected her craft during her treatments and this is the result. Enjoy!

This is one of several paintings Lynn has at the store. All framed beautifully and ready to hang in your home.

Lovely dogwood blossoms grace this mailbox. The painting has been protected with several coats of clear weatherproof finish to keep it looking fabulous for years!

Lynn has a lovely assortment of notecards with various floral pictures. It's all original work by her own hand.

This gorgeous chair would look great just about anywhere. The bold colors of the fruit motif really stand out against the black chair. If I had a place to put it, it would be gone!

Lastly, I have this decorative watering can. It didn't stay in store too long and is now gracing someones home.

I hope you have enjoyed this snippet of Lynn's work.  Of course you are always welcome to stop by the store and see these things in person. (if they're still here!)

New year, new goals, new responsibilities.

First, I hope that everyone had an enjoyable holiday season! I know I did, both personally and for this store. We had a great season with sales and I hope the trend continues at least to some degree. I feel that my hard work and sacrifice this past year is finally , maybe beginning to pay off a little for this little store. People have found us because of my Facebook page, our website, or simply saw my sign on the sidewalk telling people that we sell only North Carolina handmade. Several also saw the "best of" series on a program called NC Weekend on PBS here. They had done a spot on Mebane earlier this year and it has resulted in many people discovering our town.

This year I am going to be working on a vendor shop on our Facebook page. The goal is to reach a wider audience who may want to purchase something but either can't get to Mebane or live somewhere else entirely. I am going to try and include 1 item from each of my sellers to start and see how that goes. Considering there are over 30 sellers, it is quite a bit of work for me. But, the goal is to make this store successful and I'll do whatever I can to achieve that.
Being a business owner, I also belong to 'Destination Downtown". It consists of downtown businesses working to promote the downtown area and keeping it viable. I've joined the marketing group and we have all worked hard to plan monthly themes to entice people to come to town one evening each month. Since it involves mostly retail , they are shopping based with some having a charitable twist. We are also trying to bring the cost down to little or no extra cost to participate. In the past, some events had become to expensive for many to afford. These themes are completely separate from the big festivals that we have.
I've also been elected to be on the Steering Committee. We are having our first meeting later this week. This is a whole new thing for me, so I will find out what it entails as far as I am concerned. I am on this along with our past DD president Wendy.
Lastly, I have been in contact with several people who are interested in selling at the store. So, I'm hoping I will be gaining some new sellers, especially since I am losing some. But that is the nature of this business. So, stay tuned as they say for updates and watch our Facebook page for the "grand opening"!