I Know Where I Need Help

     Sunday's live sale was long. I knew it would be because it was all scheduled out ahead of time. I may be able to shave off some time for the next one by cutting down the time in between the groups of items becoming available. But I don't want to cut things down too much and make myself crazy. Anyway, It's pretty simple to run the sale by myself when everything is already scheduled, planned, and all the items are numbered and organized ahead of time. That makes things pretty easy for me to do single handedly. At least in comparison to how hard the sales used to be. 

     Where I need help is in the shipping department. Monday I spent 6 hours invoicing, packing, and weighing items. It is more efficient to do those things together, but it still takes a very long time. First I check to see who sent me the first message (since everyone is supposed to message me on my studio page with their email address and the country they live in) and I grab their bag and start typing up the invoice. I have a ton of items in my invoicing system, so things go a bit faster. But it still takes a chunk of time. 

     I had a doll wrapping station set up on my bed and I had extra "thank you" stickers to close up the pink bags to make them look a bit cuter when they got shoved into a box or a bubble mailer. I got a lot of steps in going back and forth during all of this. 

     I pulled out my largest Breyerfest loot box and set it up in the kitchen so I could toss the weighed packages in it. Once I pack the items I close up the package, seal it, weigh it, put the person's name on it and the weight of the package. And the box measurements if they are not printed on it. That way once all of the invoices start to be paid it is easy to just grab packages and check the shipping weight instead of having to pull out he scale and go through the whole process. 

     This time around I also invested in the sticker mailing labels. I still spent 2 hours printing and applying postage after people started to pay their invoices, but it would have been easily twice as long with the old cut, glue, tape method. This way is more expensive but saves so much time it is totally worth it. 

     So I have, so far, spent 8 hours on invoicing, packing, and shipping labels. If I had a helper to help with packing that would be pretty fantastic. I am almost sure Elecktra would help, but I would have to have a packing day that didn't get in the way of her work schedule. That is the tricky part. I am unwilling to delay shipping. I just can't do it.