THE JOY OF NEW BOTTLES

Last week pretty much epitomized my month of November, with an orchid show and sale all day every day, theatre performances every night, and not much sleep. The last month of the day-job marathon begins again tomorrow morning, so I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to post between now and December.

The one bright spot in it all is the new bottles. I packed my first wholesale order of new bottles last week, and it was a wonderful experience to be able to take bottles from the box and fill them without having to print, cut, and apply labels. The boxes are as wonderful as the bottles, a perfect fit, with labels already printed on them. I just have to pop them open and put the bottle in! I’m beginning to think that the extra expense is offset by the fact that it’s less work to prepare stock and fill orders. Customers will also have a nice label that isn’t affected by liquids, and a good box to keep their perfume in.

In the process of filling and boxing perfumes, I discovered that the outside of the boxes can be cleaned with alcohol if needed. I was able to remove some stray glue completely by rubbing the box with alcohol. The box looked perfect afterwards, so it seems that the finish is resistant to liquids as well as mechanical damage.

I never thought I’d do it, but I’ll probably end up eventually going to screen-printed labels and custom boxes for everything 30 ml or larger. 

WHAT’S KEEPING ME FROM WRITING? (And Winner of the Draw)

Fall is clearly approaching, with loads of ripe figs and spiders all over the place. I feel like I haven’t posted anything here in ages, and as usual am having a hard time getting back into the habit. A combination of factors have conspired to keep me away from the blog and away from other things that are not at the very top of my crisis mode to-do list.

First there was urgent family business to take care of. Then, I suddenly got a small window of time in which to do orchid care that had been deferred for too many years. There’s still a long way to go on that, but at least I’ve made a start on repotting big plants and potting out small ones individually. I wrote a short, one-act play to submit for our fall show, the deadline for which is fast approaching.

At the same time, I was scrambling to get pre-production samples of the new bottles ready to go to Elements. If anyone is in New York and going there, you can see Olympic Orchids’ new look at the Blackbird display and get to meet Nicole, Liz, and/or Aaron, all wonderful people. I have filled all but one bottle of my set, and will be photographing them within the next few days.

I’ve also been preparing for my class that starts a week from Tuesday. It’s a spinoff of the old one that I’ve been teaching, but is a completely new reincarnation with less “arts” and more “science”, which seems to be what students want these days. They apparently are all suffering from the illusion that “hard science”, math, and engineering courses will get them into high-paying jobs or high-paying professions, and that they can’t afford to waste time on frivolous things like the arts. I’m not so sure about that.

This weekend is full of events as well, including a training class for lavender judges. It happens tomorrow morning so I’ll probably write about it here once I experience it. Who knew that there was such a thing as lavender judging?

Last, but not least, I just realized that in all the chaos I forgot to do the drawing for those who responded to my questionnaire about gift boxes. The little scrap of paper tells me that the winner is GAIL, who gets to choose a 15 ml bottle of perfume.