Happy New Year

Back to Berlin from our christmas holidays we hope to spend a fantastic New Year’s Eve here in Berlin with some friends. Our first New Year’s Eve as a an inhabitant of Berlin.

We wish you all a happy and prosperous new year!!

Chackka … 2009 will be a good year for all of us, I’m sure!

Watch out the fireworks, don’t get injured, hurt or burned. Mind the combat! It’s said that you risk to get shot  in Berlin during the fireworks.

Let’s prepare the food for our fantiastic party now.

(pic from Flickr: espadro, linked to its source)

Merry Christmas!

To all our dear readers out there!

Have a great time and see you around next year with news how our presentation for the families worked out.

Wish us luck and take care. See you here in the first week of January.

Kisses from the Beuteltiere

Barbara&Katrin

(image from Towe My, Tm-The crocheteer)

My new home in Berlin… act two

Beginning of December I showed you the first part of my ‘new home in Berlin-project’:  some new curtains that I made by myself. Last weekend I continued these kind of activities … fixing shelves and a curtain rail on the walls. Do-it-herself is the motto of my activities. Girls to the drilling-machine…

Next task for the weekend was to sew some more curtains. And I had a very special cloth for this in my treasure box which is especially dedicated to all kinds of cloths, leathers and textiles. It was a Sari drapery in bright sea-blue, red violet boarder with golden embroidery at the boarder. A friend brought with her from India a few years ago and offered me as a really nice gift. But the problem with a Sari is: I usually don’t wear it that’s why it was cut in two halves and became a curtain. Have a look!

Business seminar – Organize yourself as an entrepreneur

Last week I followed one of our business seminars. This one was called “Organize yourself as an entrepreneur” held by Gerd Hauer from Business Institut International. His intention was to teach us how we can better organize our tasks in order to be more effective and less stressed. And being Bavarian (like me by the way) he did it in a charming, open and straightforward way. But let’s talk now about the essential, the content.

1. You should divide up your big goals in, smaller sub-goals, again smaller tasks and tiny sub-tasks. Why do that? That’s easy … you won’t get lost within your big goals. Do know the phenomena: You have a big goal to achieve, but you don’t know where to start and after a day of work you can’t remember what you did do the whole day? That’s the massage of Gerd Hauer. Divide your goal in smaller parts, because you will much easier reach these. That’s good for the ego. You have a long list of mini-task and at the end of the day it’s half done. Yep, done! It’s very satisfying to tick off or tip-ex or cancel them with a big marker. Try it out!

2. Always plan in writing, because you will relieve your brain and sleep much better. The best time to do your planning for the next day is the end of your working day, because you have all your tasks still in mind and you are well prepared for the next days routine and of course you will sleep better. Doing everything in written (no matter if it’s a PDA, a paper calendar or a simple sheet of paper) because you can better control your different tasks in writing and make them more transparent. But of course don’t forget to verify afterwards if your planning was correct. You will learn from it for your future planning. And another good tip from Mr. Hauer: Plan only 70% of your day. Only 70%?? But why? 1. Everything takes longer than you think  2. You will be disturbed by your telephone, your employees …

3. How to prioritize your tasks? Mr. Hauer showed us two different principles to deal with the importance of your tasks.

3.1. The fist principle is the “Pareto-Principle” that says that you usually manage to do 80% of your deliverables in 20% of your time. The rest of your time (80%) you need for the resting 20% of your work. Conclusion: Don’t be too much a perfectionist. It takes too much time.

3.2. The second principle is the “Eisenhower-Principle”. The former US president Eisenhower used to work like this. Structure your tasks according to the criteria of importance and urgency in groups A, B and C tasks and important: throw the tasks which are not important neither urgent in the waste bin. Throwing away all the rest of the tasks prevents you form shuffling them around all the time, because you will always have other more important tasks (A, B, or C) to do and if they are not in one of your categories you won’t need them anyway. Of course you start your working day with A-tasks that are urgent and important followed by the B-tasks and C tasks today or tomorrow. Of course you repeat this kind of analysis every day to find out your urgent and important tasks for the day.

Oh … I could write a lot more about this seminar, but I don’t want to bother you.

(graphics made by Barbara Marsupialia)

Beuteltiere – a brand get’s its claim

Stuck to our developing presentation for our families, we noticed that we are in need of a good claim for our shop-name: Beuteltiere. “Beuteltiere” as our loyal readers may know is the German word for marsupials as our blog name comes from too. This little sentence accompanying our Brand-name should summarize all we want to achieve for our customers and for us. Let’s say: it’s our dream packed in a few, striking words. UFFF! What a challenge.

Building up the slides helped us concentrating on the main, important cornerstones of our business, our roots and our visions for the future. So finally we said it will be: “Beuteltiere: Ideen finden ein Zuhause” in English: “Beuteltiere: Ideas Find a Home”

This includes that our idea of selling and making bags and giving these to people we like and cherish. So they can give our ideas a home in their homes. In addition to that, you know, that we plan to give creativity-classes as well, which matches with our claim to.

It would be nice to see you comments to “Beuteltiere: Ideas find a Home”!

Beuteltiere moodboards

Beginning of 2008 I started to follow again my passion for moodboards and collages that I had disregarded for quite a while. As I worked today on two moodboards for our big shop concept presentation end of December, you can see two examples of my work. I really love doing this!!

How I do these moodboards? First of all I collect lots of pictures at Flickr and then made a selection of pics that could match. And finally I puzzle the pictures together in Photoshop using a lot of different layers and as well as effects like multiply.

But see here the results. The first moodboards theme is “What Beuteltiere is?”. A collage to describe the ambiance of our future shop.

And here the second moodboard. Its theme is “Who is attracted by Beuteltiere?”, a collage describing our target group.

What’s your opinion about this? Can you imagine the ambiance? Would you buy something in a shop with this kind of ambiance? Do you like it? Is something missing in your opinion? Please tell me what you think about it. I am keen to hear your opinion as well as Katrins opinion, that I will get tomorrow.

(pictures all taken from Flickr, composed by Barbara Marsupialia)

And the winner is …

Do you remember my blog about the camera pouch? I was asking you all where the leather was from that I used for the pouch.  It was an old boot. My old boots weren’t in the state to be used as boots any more, but the leather was great and very soft. That’s why I threw the boots away, cut of the bootlegs and kept them. About one or even two years later they were recycled and got their second life.

And Betti alias Fontos or FontosBlog answered the question correctly,  so she is the winner of a small little textile star that I made especially for her yesterday.

The star is originally an origami star made of two bills (can be very nice as a gift), but this time I tried it with a samll rest of fabric that I still had on stock. A bit of change sometimes …

Scouting for shop locations- act four

Another building site adventure for us two…Yesterday we were better prepared: no Highheels, no skirt, but lipstick ) The trip started with a delicious coffee at the “Kaffeewirtschaft” our to be neighbor in the Senefelderstrasse. Our estate agent that day Miss Wurl was so kind to serve us. Warmed up, we explored the 3 possible accommodations, two of them on the Senefelderstrasse and one on Raumerstrasse. Here the view on the Senefelderstrasse:

Inside the building it was really a mess: Piles of cement bags, sound of proofing, etc. Blessed we, to think about our shoe ware… So it was quite hard to shoot good pics, not mentioning the horrible weather.  Essence of this appointment: we have at least 2 new alternatives for a shop location. One of the sites has two usable rooms (the smaller one for selling; the bigger one for making our stuff, giving classes and storage our goods). The other one has one room for realizing both: Selling and producing. A smaller, non public room for storage, tea kitchen etc. is there too. The last mentioned one is on Raumerstrasse, which has more public traffic. A big Plus in our opinion. But we would need to join presenting the goods with giving classes and our office. The need of cleaning our desks everyday is obvious… Are we tidy enough for that challenge?! Yeah, of course we will be able to clean up once in a while, but everyday? Well, I think we can manage. Finally a shot from outside:

Showing you the images, I´m getting flatteringly again. Oh it´s definitively overwhelming that our idea is having a home soon. Have a nice weekend you all out there!

A Ray of Light

appeared in defiance of the numb weather today. My mind cleared when I noticed these:

Barbara and me found a nice shop with these precious items. These fabulous lamps come from Marco Hinze a designer who has his showroom in the to-be neighbourhood in Berlin Prenzlauerberg. As we will need a representative showroom ourselves, we thought of taking one of Marcos light-sculptures as a shiny point of interest. What do you think?

Here you can see Marco setting up one of his “knospe-rondells”. The lamps are made out of a polypropylen-foil, which is available in different colours and luminescences as you can find here. So you can compile the different attributes together to your ever-dreamt-of-light. Isn´t that great?!

And what I found out about the inventor of these beauties: He took part on the Business Plan Competition we are participting too.

Scouting for shop locations- act three

Today Katrin and me visited a construction site that will be very soon three very nice, cosy little shops.

The whole tour around the three (soon to be)  shops in Senefelder Straße 33 in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg was a real adventure. Avoiding holes in the floor we stumbled around in the location. Especially I had some girls problems with my shoes: high heels . If I had known before, …

But see here the pics yourself:

Looks like adventure, hein?

Our conclusion of the day: These shops will be three cosy, little shops of which two of them are suitable for us. The two bigger ones 52qm and 57qm suit very well to our needs and the potential that these road is offering us with the three new shops, another shop construction site close by and ‘MACHmit! Museum für Kinder‘ almost opposite  is very attractive for us. Although the shops are smaller than the last one in Dunckerstraße we think that is has more atmosphere (see the stucco!!) and it’s worth it.

(pics from Barbara Marsupialia)