Valentine's Day is my favorite hand-made holiday. As a kid, I loved making valentines and decorating shoe boxes to collect valentines  my classmates. Over the years, I've helped my kids to make some fun and creative valentines. I love helping them turn their ideas into one of a kind valentines. Instructions for all of these can be found on my other blog, http://www.namesakedesign.com/search?q=valentine.

But handmade valentines aren't just for kids! Brian and I agreed along time ago that Valentine's Day should be a low budget holiday.  I usually make him a card or crafty gift and he usually cooks us a fantastic meal.  

After designing our latest kit - Candy Hearts for Valentine's Day, it dawned on us that our paint by number kits make the perfect gift/activity for a creative Valentine's date. Two paint by number kits, plus a romantic meal, plus wine adds up to a pretty nice way to spend the evening with your Valentine. To make it a little bit more affordable we're offering any two kits for $50 - just use promo code LOVE2PAINT.

If you're single, don't fret. Invite some friends over, order some paint by number kits and enjoy a fun DIY paint night at home. We offer discounts for paint parties and free delivery in the DC area. Check out our paint parties page, http://www.wehgo.com/parties.htmlwww.wehgo.com/parties.html or email us at [email protected].

We'd love to hear some other creative ways to celebrate Valentine's Day!

Starting a new business can be all consuming - especially when you work from home. I am constantly thinking about ways to improve, expand, and better market our kits. I also always seem to be dreaming up new kits - while running, cleaning, walking the dog etc. Designing kits is my favorite thing about Wehgo, but there is so much more that goes into any creative business. In order to to grow we need to hit our  sales goals - yes, we have sales goals. Craft shows and festivals have been a great way to sell our kits. Brian and I both enjoy meeting costumers and getting to show off our kits in person. Unfortunately, craft shows are seasonal - Spring and Fall (and a few holiday shows in Dec).  

The break between shows is a great opportunity to focus on improving our website and our online product listings - you may have noticed our new difficulty meter.  We've also been spending a lot of time working on driving traffic to our website. We are slowly becoming Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) savvy. The Internet is awesome and its hard to imagine having a small business before e-comerce. At the same time, it can be so  frustrating. There are SO. MANY. STORES. Although we have a unique product,  we don't have the budget to buy our way up the search engine results ladder.  Enter Etsy.  
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Etsy is the largest online market place for handmade sellers. There are currently ~1.6 million active sellers on Etsy. Although Etsy is HUGE,  its been a great tool for us to reach new customers. We sell all of our kits on Etsy for the same price as our website. If you are an Etsy shopper, please consider liking our shop, www.etsy.com/shop/wehgo.