Excellent book. The title says it all. Having it straight from Charles Swindoll is the best way to explore this subject.
What is God's will for our lives? How do we find out what it is? Can we find out? These and other questions are discussed and answered.
Everything's coming together. We're working on the displays we purchased to refinish them to fit our style. The power upgrade is continuing tomorrow and we've ordered 4x6 beams to be the support for the hanging lights.
The investment required to open the new lighting lines is the hard part. Everyone has large minimums to open up their product to us. So, getting 3 or 4 new vendors will be the most for now. Hopefully as this takes off, we can offer more.
But, these new lines will enable us to offer many lighting options for the outside and the entire inside of your home.
We are moving forward with our plan of increasing our presence in the lighting market. We met with a large lighting company yesterday and had a great meeting. They are excited to be partnered with us as the new distributor of their product in the Hayward area.
We are changing out the courtyard area of the Ahlgren's Old World showroom to make it the lighting area. We will be displaying all new vanity lights, wall sconces, chandeliers, and pendant lights in this area.
To do this we need to upgrade the power and build out a structure that will support all of the new hanging lights.
Also, we are buying some of the displays from the old lighting store for which we are grateful.
The challenges of running a bricks and mortar store in the internet age just came home to roost.
A young gal with a baby on her back was showing her mother (or mother-in-law) a small box of about 30 acorns that she said was perfect to accessorize an arrangement she had. We sell this box for $8.95.
And, I'm not making this up, her next comment was, "I'm going to look these up on the internet."
I'm just floored. Taking the time to look for it on the net, buy, pay shipping and wait for it to arrive vs. buying now for $8.95.
I think I'm really starting to worry.
As I've written before, customers can be very interesting in how they interact with me, the person behind the register.
Most folks will say "Hi", while others ignore me altogether.
Others immediately tell me they're just looking, or browsing, or bumming.
Today a guy came in and said, "I just came for the free smell!"
If you have a website, you can sign up for a free tool from Google that monitors the traffic on your site. Called Google Analytics, it is a great tool to analyze many aspects of the people visiting your site.
When we started updating the site last April, I took a snapshot of our site traffic from Analytics. Now with many new features and updates on the site I have taken a new look at our numbers.
Our traffic has tripled and returning visitors are up from 13% to 28%. That shows that people have more interest and reason to come back to the site.
Minnesota is our number one state with Wisconsin second.
The Show Rooms and Catalog pages are the most popular. With the new Show Room pages update I would expect those pages to get heavier traffic.
The Catalog is my new focus. I haven't updated that in quite a while. I want to get our most popular items up for people to buy going into the Christmas season.
Is a phrase I hear wives tell their husbands when they see something they like in our store. The men's reaction vary from, "I can make it better!", to a rolling of the eyes as if saying, "Along with everything else you want me to do."
Then there are the grizzled old veterans of marriage who merely nod their heads in agreement and move on.
We've already sold a piece from the sale items page of our new gallery.
You should check it out, go to our Show Rooms page of the website and double click on the picture of the Sale Items to see our online list of items on sale.
Finally, the updated showroom gallery is up and running. This will allow me to update the pictures on a regular basis so the content is current.
We've added galleries for Sale Items and Lighting. I hope to add pictures of Mika's design projects soon.
People have told us that they look at our showroom pictures to get an idea of what we sell. They even select items based on the pictures. The problem in the past was that many times the item they wanted was gone because the picture was old.
The way the Sale Items are going to work is if you see something you like, call us and we can work out the details. We will not have an online shopping cart for those items.
The Lighting gallery is a sampling of the lighting we carry. As I mentioned previously that is an area we hope to expand on.
So, check back often and watch as the stores evolve with the seasons.
