After one week from surgery, I'm back at work.  The boys have done a good job keeping up with the online sales while I pick up where they left off to do some more grunt work.  This of course entails "stimulating" but the crucial tasks of databasing, keeping up-to-date with customer feedback, reconciling amazon settlements, and watching the analytics.

Meanwhile, downstairs is Lester working at something new-rental return maintenance.  This is the time of year when our quarterly rentals come back for a renewal, buy, trade-in, upgrade, and the return.  The rental returns are left at the top of the stairs, and eventually one of us takes them downstairs to be left on the workbenches.Touch-ups and case cleaning are what's to be done but Lester is the master when it comes to instrument polishing.

Any stool requires at least three legs to stand on and so does any business.  Les makes and repairs bow, puts on his show as a shop foreman.  Alex is the jack of all trades as founder, businessman, restorationer, and salesman- his favorite role.  My leg of the work is the grundge & routine of maintaining office work in order, databasing, emailing, keeping tabs on daily online sales.  Of course, there's always the fun stuff like photographing instruments and listing eBay & Amazon items as well.

Unfortunately, I had to take a leave of absence this week to recover from an operation.  Just when I thought I had filled out all the Amazon orders, I noticed another batch waiting to be fulfilled the day after I was in recovery.  The boys made a big deal since they haven't had much practice but they'll be thankful of the processing system that I've kept up.

The shop may be missing a leg for this week, but they'll survive.  We're not all pigeon-holed to do specific jobs but our musical background can us afloat and supported.

-chg

The shop officially opens at 11:00 a.m. but work starts early for Les this week. Les is a our aspiring in-house bow maker of trade. I'll post a more up-close interview of Les, assuming that he agrees, of what his typical day is like.

Ever since he got off of his last university class, he's been inspired to go all out. Every morning at 6:00, he's opened up shop and planes away at a new stick. He comes in early, because there's less disturbance of customers and a chance to get in some more hours of work. Typically it takes 40 hours of labor per bow. This week? He's managed to crank out 3 bows.

Meanwhile, I have the luxury of strolling in midmorning. The daily morning ritual consists of checking emails, fulfilling Amazon sales & eBay auctions overnight, packing, databasing, and managing the phones. Despite working in a workshop environment, office work inevitably finds its way into a violin shop. It's all tedious but someone's gotta do it!

-Ollavaca

Its been a long time since the last post.  This week we've thrown up a lot of small baby violins up online.  All of these are in good playing condition and were consigned to us. 
The odd item you might find listed is a rowing machine by our boss who's try to get rid of it.  I suppose you can bid on it but I think a violin would be a better investment.  Plus, I wouldn't know where to begin with how to ship such a thing.  We've pretty much got the shipping of violins thing down pat here.

In other news, not trying to advertise, we've withdrawn our efforts from setting up an Amazon webstore.  It's still a beta product that is in the works and we felt that we couldn't justify the fees and commissions they were taking from us.  We probably will still sell on their platform, but we may end up coming back to eBay for help on developing a webstore.  Who knows!

Otherwise, the shop has been quite for the past few weeks, but hopefully that will all change.  With graduation coming up, we've sent out postcards with coupons on the back to see if local traffic will pickup.

That's all for now

Happy Biddings!
-Ollavaca