Fulfillment

Fulfillment is a word most commonly used these days to describe a warehouse where orders are filled and shipped from. It's a process that can be completed once that package is delivered. I myself am learning how to fulfill orders, from my home. I'm challenged by space, organization and an army of cats who just want to jump into boxes. 

But of course fulfillment can also be a state of contentment, a feeling of having accomplished something. As the date of the first sale draws closer, I was hoping to feel more fulfilled. 

Most entrepreneurs struggle to describe the ways that ideas are never really done, finished, an item checked off a to do list. While a wedding I design will have an end time, the party does eventually stop-almost everything else I do never really ends. My design studio just keeps evolving, through everything from slow downs in events, my needing a mental health break, a global pandemic. Some I control and some are way beyond me. 

When I went to my first class at The Clay Studio in late summer 2020, there were 5 people in Mold Making & Casting with the talented Hiroe Hanazano. Hiroe's patience with me and my extraordinarily complicated ideas is something I'm so grateful for. I went into the class with the idea that I too could make simple, wholesale priced vases to sell to other florists for events. And then I took my first cast piece out of its mold. 

It was a revelation, a cheap common material like plaster allowed the most delicate layers of porcelain or stoneware to cling to the mold walls. You could achieve profiles with a thinness that throwing or hand building could never achieve. Did you know some people consider slip cast wares to not be true art? They are bonkers. As I went through the 10 week class for a second time, my ideas of what I could do with this medium and potential product had been completely changed. 

So in that sense, I suppose I fulfilled the basics of that idea. I have now made vases that I will be able to sell to clients for their own use. They are not simple, they are not low wholesale cost items to be made in mass quantity but they are vases. They are beautiful objects and they were made to make flower arranging easier, a delight not a chore. I hope anyone who buys one can always be surrounded by flowers. 

I also feel like I just climbed to the top of a hill, peeked at the horizon and saw like 5 more hills I want to climb. Not need to, want to. And to me that is entrepreneurship. It's never done, the ideas change, expand, circle back, require new thinking, sometimes they require that you put them away and focus on something else for a while. And I look forward to sharing what the next hill I climb is, making my first product collection lead me to several more ideas so I better get my boots on.