Evolution of an idea

Thursday, March 24, 2011 |
Last September Rachelle and I met for coffee to discuss our Christmas plans - for the business, not the turkey and stuffing kind!

I was excited, I had an idea.  We ordered coffee and I handed Rachelle my prototype, a hastily made bunch of cardboard strips held together with string!!!!  Luckily for me Rachelle saw past the kindergarten level construction and agreed they could be a great addition to our products.  Later that night they got their name - Tree Tags!

The idea was a customer could order personalized Christmas decorations.  These could feature whatever they liked:  Family members, dates, pets.........







These were some of our initial ideas and orders. Then we realized these could be the gift that kept on giving, as after Christmas they could be transformed into key chains, with a split ring that we included:


People loved them and we made over 70 of them between October and Christmas.  We loved the way people used their imagination, we made a Tree Tag for Makka Pakka (a character from the polpular children's program 'The Night Garden')  we did 10 'friendship' tags for 10 alumni attending a 10 year college reunion, a lady ordered 17 so all the children in her family could have one on their tree.

Then came January. 
No more tree tags :(  Or so we thought........
How wrong we were:)

No longer called Tree Tags, on Jan 10th we got an order for 3 date key rings.  Our customer wanted them like tags but with horizontal writing rather than vertical:


We loved the idea and the end result and our customer graciously allowed us to use her idea and photos of her pieces.  In fact it was when my husband was photographing those pieces that he came up with the idea of security tags:


These could have either a telephone number or email address on one side and, 'if found, contact' on the reverse.  I did agree to make him a freebie for his trouble!

The next phase of the evolution I can take credit for though....wedding and engagement tags.  The couples names or initials on one side and then their anniversary date on the other:




What's next in the development of this product?  I have no idea but I hope we shall see the Tree Tag in many more forms for a very long time to come.  What would you like to see on them?







1 comment:

Karen said...

Hi new follower here and FB fan. This idea is so great! Please consider posting a link to your blog on the Crafty Bloggers page on facebook. <3

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