Personalized Brides

This venture has been almost a year in the making.  It all began right around this time last year when I was busily planning my wedding.  Since my mom has had an embroidery business (specializing in figure skating apparel) for almost 20 years, she really wanted to incorporate her embroidery into my wedding and it turned out that we could make beautiful embroidered napkins for about the same price as renting plain ones, so that's just what we did!  When we realized how inexpensively we could do it, we thought it would be a great idea to offer these personalized napkins to the public, too!  And so, Personalized Brides was born.  I bought the domain name about 2 months before I got married and hoped that this new project would get me through my post-wedding depression that I knew would come when we got home from our honeymoon.  I thrive on projects, so I thought this would be perfect!

When I got home from my honeymoon, I fell into a major slump.  I was so sad that all of the planning and anticipation was over and I spent about 2 weeks without an ounce of motivation.  Somewhere around the end of July, though, I got a sudden desire to really do this.  I have since built this site from the ground up, created every single product and product image (obviously with the help of my mom's embroidery), done product comparisons, priced the products and I've done all of the site design.  I would spend every minute of every night working on it all through late summer and fall last year until the holidays rolled around.  I don't think I touched it from Thanksgiving to the New Year, but in January I decided it was time to stop adding products and just finalize all of the content that I already had so that I could actually get this thing up and functional.  I got the shopping cart working, but there were still so many little details to finish.  I planned to have everything complete by Valentine's Day.

Well, between Bubby's surgery, finding out I was pregnant and feeling like crap for a couple months, Valentine's Day came and went.  I had lost all my motivation again and no matter what I did - I didn't want anything to do with my site.  I was so close and my mom would bug me about it all the time, but it wouldn't do anything.  Then, I received an email on April 12th and to my shock, it was an order!  I couldn't believe it!  There were still so many problems with my site and so many things that needed fixed - but it was the kick in the pants that I needed!  I have spent the last couple weeks fixing problems and adding things like keywords, descriptions, etc (all the pain-in-the-ass stuff that I never wanted to do, but are crucial for search engines) to the products.  I have a ton of descriptions left to do, dozens of products that I still want to add and I am still making some changes, but to my surprise, I received another order this morning!!!!  I have no idea how people are finding my site right now because it would literally be about 30 pages deep in any search engine's results - but I am just thrilled! 

I have been so secretive about this - mostly because I was afraid that I would never finish it - but I finally feel confident that I can do this and that I can be proud of all the work I have put into this site!  Wish me luck!

http://www.personalizedbrides.com