Flags, flags and more flags.....

My eldest son, Owen, shows quite a lot of interest in Gillian Jones Designs. He keeps asking to help with the pictures. Now I love my son to bits, but the thought of teaching an 8 year old the intricacies of Adobe Creative Suite (which although brilliant is not the most intuitive set of software) makes be shiver slightly. We've had the odd play, but I think I'll wait a couple of years before using him as my chief designer!

I don't, however, want to discourage his enthusiasm, so together we had a good think about what he could do to help with Gillian Jones Designs and learn a bit more about business. We came up with flags! We found a wholesaler, decided on the designs we would like to stock, worked out profit margins and ordered flags (initial capital investment courtesy of Mum!).

So far, he has sold flags at the Historic Dockyard in Portsmouth and at a school fete (all profits to the PTA - he's a good lad!). 

The next step was to add them to the website, so I taught Owen how to add products. And he did! I showed him once, and he added the others by himself. The joys of teaching the technologically savvy.

We haven't quite come to an agreement on how much he earns each time a flag is sold, but we'll have more discussions about that no doubt! At the moment he is happy to reinvest the earnings into more stock. We've just bought some hand waving flags which Owen is sure will prove popular with children. We shall have to test out his theory at our next event, which is a Love Southsea Market in Palmerston Road on November 8th.

We are also having a go at social media marketing and are running a competition on the Gillian Jones Designs Facebook page to win a flag. All you have to is like the post before 23rd October!

It's great fun working with Owen and hopefully he is learning something. Perhaps this is something I should package up and sell to schools as a learning tool!

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