The Cozy Home Spa continues to eek forward, a little bit at a time. Here’s the latest:
Powerpoints & Pitching
About 2 weeks ago, I taught a workshop on business plan pitching to 50 students at BYU-Idaho. For the presentation, we put together a “good” and “bad” sample on powerpoints, and we based them on The […]

Traction on the Project
Back in August, I started The Cozy Home Spa project and the major things accomplished were:

Developing the products.
Setting up the online store at www.thecozyhomespa.com.
Having a booth at 2 county fairs (6 days total) in order to get some market feedback.
Creating a database of potential customers to market to.
Getting photos of the […]

So, using the Wordpress-blog-as-internet-store is good (=free), but is also a challenge.
I’m working on how I can make the site informative and credible for the products, functional so customers can make purchases smoothly, and implementing enough visual draw for marketing purposes.
I’m looking for something that is more of an organic design (rather than […]

I spent this morning editing The Cozy Home Spa website, based on some recommendations from Janet Meiners as well as basic marketing common sense.
The next step, now that the site is “basically” set up, will be to add more products, refine the site, and most importantly, promote the site & do some basic internet […]

A short stream-of-consciousness photo description:
The jar contains three kinds of sugar (brown, white, and cane) for “do-it-yourself” scrub kits, the “Oat.Milk” jar has finely ground oats & milk for baths (yum!), the “Pine.Apple” is a pineapple-olive oil facial, the angel looking thing also has a creme rinse hair treatment & headband, the box o’ […]

So, I was looking at my Google Analytics for thecozyhomespa.com…. and saw that these three keyword phrases sent 3 referrals to the site today:
1. “cinnamon bar soap”
If you type this phrase into Google, my site comes up as 13 on the first page:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cinnamon+bar+soap
2. “oatmeal cinnamon soap”
Also, #3 on this phrase:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=oatmeal+cinnamon+soap
3. “brown sugar scrub”
And #19 here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=brown+sugar+scrub&hl=en&start=10&sa=N
***
This is just […]

Image courtesy of sleestak66.
So, tomorrow night I’ll be setting up a booth at a local fair for The Cozy Home Spa, which I’ll be at for 3 days this weekend.
Kind of reminds me of December’s kiosk experience, except, without having a 30-day commitment to live in the mall.
It’s funny because there’s a […]

Image courtesy of ninjapoodles.
Today was a long day…! Spent a lot of time getting things ready for the fair this week.
The main things I did today were:
Product Development

Working on the recipes for products, including:

Chocolate facial
Oatmeal honey facial
Pineapple facial
Lemon honey lip balm
Cocoa lip balm
Almond lotion
Cinnamon-vanilla sugar scrub
Lemon sugar scrub
Rice pudding bath salts & sugars
Oatmeal milk […]

Image courtesy of continuousshot.
So, I just shipped the first online order for The Cozy Home Spa (thanks, Mark!)
While I was getting the order ready, I had that feeling… the jumping off the cliff feeling. Or rather, how you feel right before you jump off the cliff.
A bit of apprehension, some what ifs, […]

Quick update on things I did today:

Registered business with the state.
Got business license from the city.
Called state tax commission for sales license info.
Began work on a business plan.
Researched market statistics & trends for the spa industry (will point out some positive info later)
Set up a checking account & etc.
Purchased bulk paper (there’s a great […]