We are busily working on laying the foundation for our new company that extends the S.STEIN brand into an eco-friendly line of products. Sher and I each held focus groups at our homes with friendly audiences. Our other partners will be doing the same in the coming weeks. I invited a ton of people to mine, and was hoping for a mix of men and women, but ended up with women only for one reason or another.

My group was fascinating. One topic we discussed was work, and what work is. The work that the women don’t get paid for outstrips the work they do get paid for by many times. All of the women in my group were engaged in teaching of one sort or another as part of their paid work. I might add here that none of them do this full time because their other responsibilities in life require that they are there for those. One woman had no children at home, and the rest did. Some of the common threads of unpaid work were:

cleaning, of course
tutoring
volunteer work (mostly related to child rearing but not all)
driving (kids in modern times need to be driven everywhere)
organizing
social coordination–all of the women were married and responsible for coordinating social activities.

I found myself relating perfectly to all of these jobs.

I usually feel lucky compared to other women I know because my husband cooks and does laundry. He never has, to my knowledge, cleaned the toilet, but he does vacuum from time to time. When he isn’t traveling for work, or isn’t at work, he shares car duty. Nonetheless, he is a man, and as I was talking to these women in my dining room last night the point hit home quite succinctly.

A couple of the women who came to the group brought their children with them. That was fine. If I wanted them there I needed to accommodate kids too. Ken said he would look after them, and set them up with a movie to keep them out of our hair. Not five minutes into our discussion, the screaming and laughing voices of children drowned out our own voices. I went to see what was going on. All four of the kids were playing in my office of all places. I pushed them out to the great room, banishing them from “our” half of the house.

I wondered where my fabulous husband was. So, I went hunting. I found him stretched out on our comfortable bed reading a novel, completely oblivious to what was going on anywhere else in the house. I tried to remain calm. “Ken, can you give me a hand with the kids?” He seemed confused. “I mean, you did say that you were going to keep them contained.”

When I returned to my group I could feel my anger welling up. When is the last time that I stretched out on a bed to read a novel? I know, it was the last time I went on a trip without my family. I should add that he has just returned from a three week long trip to Brazil where he was studying concepts of time on the beach of all things. Clearly, he learned the lessons there all too well, and has not adjusted to the hectic pace of family life in the northern climes.

So, in the end, I am just like all of these other women, and my husband isn’t any better than any of theirs, but he does do laundry and cooks. The next group I do is going to be all men. I am dying to hear how they define work and how work defines them.

Surprise of all surprises. Advertising actually works! I don’t mean advertising in the conventional sense. We did sign up for Google adwords and all of the usual stuff. What works the best is advertising by word of mouth. And guess what else? It costs the least. It costs the least but requires the most insistence, and the most work. Every day I sit down at my computer with the goal of finding just one convert, one person who will click a link and visit our website. One person who will think that our products are cool–which they are–will post a tidbit on their blog about us, and kaboom, we get a few orders. Amazing.

Sherry’s life there in Santa Fe is a bit different that mine, since she is the main woman (I’m kind of the behind the scenes gal–the one building the set; she is the star on stage). You can tell she is really busy–going berzerk– because she doesn’t have time to post to our blog, although one day we hope she will. She is there working to fulfill orders, designing new bags, and doing whatever else needs doing on the production end, including paying the bills. I, on the other hand, have the luxury of living my life online.

The days are whirling by. Every day we are getting more and more hits on our website, and sales are slow but steady. This is a scary business we are in. There are so many handbags out there; it is unbelievable. One of the issues we have encountered in the market, is that our product is so different from what is out there; we don’t have a lot of studs and tassels, and our bags are not ultra-fem. We believe that this is a good thing, but maybe we are deluding ourselves!

The whole experience of building a web business has been educational, to say the least. I never thought that doing this would be a full time job, but it is. Who would have ever thought that there were so many shopping blogs out there, and so many different ways to connect with people? One of the best things about doing this has been learning that people in the world are generally pretty nice; they want to help make our business a success.

In case you are wondering about what’s new, and you haven’t visited our site lately, we are getting into felt. This felt is heavy-duty industrial felt made from recycled wool. Our fall line will sport some new ones as well, but if you want a preview, check out: The New Gearbag on our site.