Just a few shots from my day - the coastal plain, pancake flat, the water everywhere and long, long bridges and the Carolina blue sky!

Okay, I know this may sound crazy but I stayed in not so savory a place last night in Elizabeth City, NC and the room did not have a coffee maker - that is a make it or break it thing for me - the coffee maker is a room essential. I can put up with the strangly lumpy crumbled foam pillow if I have to, the hard as a rock bed, the low lighting, but no coffee maker is a deal breaker - I won't be booking the Traveler's Inn again that's for sure. But one thing I found really strange is the soap.....a brand in shiny wrapper, and note the back, Made in India! How much cheaper can soap be because it comes from India? Very curious indeed. What would Proctor & Gamble think?

This week so far has taken me on a good tour to see customers in the coastal region of North Carolina. First, on the way towards the coast, I saw a unique customer in a very small town of Grifton - a restaurant and home and garden store - a neat place where you can get almost anything you need and a meal to boot. They have recently added a tea room and some additional business with that. Our lace (along with other home furnishings items) has been moved around the store several times and is now in an admittedly not great place in the far part of the store, up some stairs. The owner's wife is going to move the lace over by the tea room and restaurant where it will be in a traffic pattern and get more attention. Her husband has been going through some pretty serious health issues and business has also been tough for them, so she really has her hands full. She enjoyed seeing all the new products and will be ordering when business is a little better - hopefully when garden season arrives. I found two new customers in Atlantic Beach and in Cedar Point, both very happy to have our line to supplement their current offerings. I went to see a customer in New Bern but arrived 30 minutes too late - they are a bakery/restaurant and have our lace at the cash register area in the front of the store. We had only agreed to meet that afternoon and exact time was not discussed. The restaurant closes at 3pm and I got there at 5 minutes past 3 because of two long running appointments in the morning. I did see the owner and also called his wife to apologize for being late. I asked for her 'ideal time' and she said 10:30am so I told her I would make a day soon when we could meet at that time - she sounded appreciative. I got the photo of the sailboats right at the end of the main street shopping district in New Bern. I did some prospecting in Washington and Edenton, but didn't come up with anything concrete - but a couple of neat photos of the sunset and the cypress knees under the trees in Edenton. I did make a Provinaire appointment back in Washington on my way back south which was today and went pretty well. I made it to a good customer in Duck who is struggling but opens her store in March and hopes to make it through the year. She loves our products and intends to keep doing a good job with them. I went by a customer in Nags Head whose store is closed yet, but it is good to get the visual and location down for later times. It is really hard to plan to see all the customers and allow time for prospecting too. I am having a little trouble finding that groove but hopefully I will find what works as I do this more. I do know now there there is lots of remote wilderness in the NC coastal plain!

This week, I spent three good days on the road in southeastern Virginia. My goal was to seek out all existing accounts that I could reach and see, and prospect when possible. My first appointment in Suffolk was with a wonderful lady who carries our line on her website. She has a business making really nice sweatshirts and t's and added Heritage to her website a bit over a year ago and is doing some really good business with our line. She is a sharp cookie and really focuses on customer service. Unlike most customers I see, she was already thoroughly aquainted with our new products! I was impressed with her and the way she is growing her business. We had a great visit and she appreciated seeing all the products up close. I think she will continue to do well with the line because she appears to work hard and give her best to all her endeavors, be it her own business, selling our line or her farm market stand in warmer weather. I moved on and saw other customers that day heading for Virginia Beach to check out some existing customers and a potential new customer who expressed interest in Atlanta. Where one of our customers had been was a giant new shopping center, so that combined with a disconnected phone tells me that customer is gone. I found four customers this week who are no longer in business, but I felt compelled to see that for myself. I did have good appointments this week with a few customers who want to get into our window treatments in a bigger way. That is exciting to me because window treatments can be great business for our Heritage dealers. There are no comparable products on the market and window treatments can be a bigger ticket sale for both Heritage and the retailer. I have included a little slideshow with a few images from the week. Other than business things, one thing I have learned is that when a motel says they have high speed wireless, that is not always the case. Someone there has it, but not always you! I am learning to not get to riled over that and just do the best I can. It is hard though, because missing a day of checking email can lead to a long night of the next night when the wireless actually works. I also have gotten behind on my blog as a result, but that is how the cookie crumbles... I do want to mention the best thing I have found to help with sleeping in less than ideal conditions (noise in halls, outside or planes taking off when you are at the airport motel) - I have an iPod iTouch and small speakers and there is a fantastic app that you can get for I think $0.99 called 'White Noise'. It gives you many choices of noises you can play and I have found the 'brown noise' turned up a bit to be the best cover for all ambient noise when trying to sleep on the road. Cudos to the application and Apple!! It has greatly enhanced my ability to catch zzz's when traveling. And cudos to Subway for the $5 foot long sub!! When selling on a budget I like finding all food groups in one inexpensive meal!! Next week, the NC and SC coast!! More later.

First today, I need to update my blog for last week's travels. I spent a few days last week seeing some North Carolina customers in the Winston-Salem area and south to Kannapolis, with some prospecting in Greensboro, which I need to continue at some point. I did have a great meeting with a custom curtain/home decor store, that I hope will evolve into more business, although sometimes hard to tell. Some customers get very excited 'in the moment' of a presentation and then as time goes on, we get lost in the shuffle. The challenge will be to follow up and contact them again, as I monitor what they are ordering (or not, as the case may be). I had always passed the sign for 'Historic Spencer Shops' on I-85 going south towards Kannapolis, and now being a salesperson, decided to stop in and see who I might interest in the line. Unfortunately, Spencer was becoming a ghost town much as Shennandoah, VA that I passed through a week earlier. There were signs however, of a growing artist presence on one historic block, so perhaps revitalization will come in that way, creating interest and traffic, and again independent retailers. I have added a three photo slideshow for you to see a little of what I saw in Spencer that day.

Just a quick note to any of you post-readers (and I thank you!) - if you want to see any photo larger, you can double click on it and get a large photo to view. Then just hit your arrow to go back to the blog. Sometimes the small photo size just doesn't show you very much.

Well, I never had a chance to do the final post for my week in Virginia. I finished the week with a call on a customer with an Amish furniture store in Farmville, VA. They really are into the traditional lace and do a good job with it. The buyer is willing to try a couple of our new US Made linens that are reversible to add to her lace assortment - I hope they are successful for her. I stopped into a local bakery to get a coffee for my trip through southern Virginia and on home and low and behold was a neat glass case full of classic lunchboxes where I found a lunchbox just like my first grade barn lunchbox. Wonder if that could be the one I had? I wanted to take US 15 through the backcountry and do a little prospecting on the way home. I found a nice herd of Bison in Red Oak, VA contentedly grazing and also an old general merchandise store, long closed down, with a 'Vendors Wanted' sign in the front - I am pretty sure this isn't a good match for us . . . I did stop in Clarksville, VA and spoke for a long while with a woman in a design and home decor store who may be interested in both our Heritage and Provinaire lines. I will have to go back for a presentation when her husband is in the store too. Overall it was a good week last week for learning, laying groundwork, starting relationships, finding potential new accounts and I even wrote a few orders. I am hopeful as the weather warms, store-keeper's wallets will thaw and they will have money to spend. Right now, more want to keep the money there, safe, or don't have any in the first place. But there is hope with these folks, that things will get better and people will once again shop. Buy local!!

Hello again, from the road. This I took today while driving (don't tell the law) heading down the road towards Roanoke, Virginia. It is always nice and uplifting to see a great sunset. Yesterday I had a great meeting in Madison, Virginia with Plow & Hearth catalog. The buyer is a very personable, knowledgeable guy and was very interested in many of our products - YEA! He wrote me an email during the day to say thanks for a great meeting - always nice to get when you finally finish the day and start your after hours second job of checking emails in the hotel to make sure all the other stuff you are responsible for is also getting done. After the Plow & Hearth meeting, I headed over the mountains into the Shenandoah Valley to see some other small customers and do a little cold calling and prospecting. I hit the towns of Elkton and New Market. On the way to New Market, I drove through the historic town of Shenandoah, with beautiful wooden signs pointing me to the historic railroad district. I turned left and headed there and running parallel to the tracks were beautiful historic store fronts with large front windows - the only disturbing thing was that they all were empty with 'For Rent' signs in the windows. It was downright eerie - you could almost hear the sounds of people roaming the streets, gravel crunching under their feet, but no one was anywhere to be seen. An interesting thing that happened to me yesterday too, was that on three different occasions, three different hawks came out of the trees (or maybe one hawk followed me all day??) and for a short moment appeared to be racing my Subaru, right above my windshield. Funny thing is they didn't even appear to be trying that hard - could it be that they were making light of my car? Or were they maybe saying, you can do it, all you have to do is keep flying? I may never know, but it was a wonderous yet brief sight that added an extra touch of joy to my day. My main activity today was seeing one of our better stores, a lace 'Gallery' store (actually two stores in close proximity) where I spent 5 hours with the owner, showing product, talking about updating the product and displays, and hearing her angst over the current economic situation and downturn in business. I know she speaks the truth, because in the five hour period there was but one customer who purchased one runner - a $34 sale for the day. That hurts. She is very excited about our new products and will be bringing them in - when she has some money in the coffers. I told her I believe in the independent retailer and what they offer the public - product differentiation and customer service, value and quality. She agreed, but kept asking 'when will people start spending again?' I told her that I believe at some point the pent up demand will break the dam and people will spend. She liked that.

Well, it is groundhog day and also the first 'official' day of my road repping career. So, after much planning and setting of appointments, I headed for Warrenton in north central Virginia. I had booked an early afternoon visit with one of our current customers who has grown her business over the last couple of years. My hope is that she can grow it even further. We had a good meeting with me showing the new products from January 2008 through January 2009, and she taking copious notes. I really wanted to leave there with an order in hand, but that was not to happen. She is going to put something together and fax it to me - later. After that appointment, I did some prospecting coming upon a garden center/gift shop with the cool barn wall of windows and doors - so inviting I had to take a peek. Being the off season, the owner/buyer was not in, so I left a card and some info and kept on going (of course, after jotting down the name and address of the store for later). I paid a call on another very small customer, but the buyer again was not in, but I did speak with the manager (who appears to have some influence) and suggested some products to try making some notes in a catalog to leave with her. I went on to Culpeper, VA, a town of special significance, since my mom spent some of her early teen years growing up on a dairy farm there. The church you see pictured, is Saint Stephen's Episcopal Church and it is significant because my mother played the organ there - and not always such holy music - she was caught playing the boogie woogie on the big organ once!! It was close to 5pm when I was roaming around the main downtown area, but I was able to make note of a few shops to follow up with at a later time. The Frost Cafe caught my eye - I thought I saw Edward Hopper sitting in the window. And fitting is the name, as a snow storm is on the way tonight. Tomorrow should be an interesting day, trying to keep appointments with customers in the foothills and mountains with ice and snow on the ground! Wish me luck!