Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Costumes

My dream is to own a costume shop. And although I am years and major funds away from ever reaching that goal, I am jumping in and opening another website.....a costume shop!
I have been doing really well with Addicted to Rockabilly and am still planning to grow with it, but now I have decided to divide my time between two sites. I have gotten savvy enough with it that my website work only takes me just a couple of hours a day and I really need more income than it is producing. (my property taxes went up $300 a MONTH!!!!)
I chose such a small niche for the first site that growth is just not coming fast enough. I have already completed my first initial costume buy in order to stock my store (although the money isn't exactly secured yet....yikes! More about that later) and now I am at a dead-lock deciding on a name.
I know that there are lots of creative folks who read my blog, so help me out.
I need a name that is short and easy to remember, preferably beginning with a letter close to the beginning of the alphabet and that has an open website.
I am just going to open up as an ebay store for now but will branch out to regular ecommerce later, but it is best to go ahead and secure the web-address.

Funding. Well, I found this really cool site prosper.com and I have been researching the hell out of it and think I am going to try to get my starting capital there. It is the world's first people-to-people lending site. It essentially is cutting out the middle man (ie., banks) and that way investors get a higher (and riskier) return and borrowers get a better rate. The way it works is that people can lend as little as $50 each so I'd be getting my loan from a number of investors. Prosper collects the money, gives it to me and then I make monthly payments to prosper and they disperse it to all the investors. I intent to try and borrow $5000. Once I get the thing set up it takes a week for potential investors to "bid" on my loan (this can actually lower my interest rate) and then I'll find out if we are a go.

I also set up a group on Prosper which actually gives me kick backs for signing folks up so I have been marketing that all over ebay...free money is free money!!!

2 comments:

Jazz said...

How about:

A Costume For You
Creative Costumes
Custom Costumes

Sorry I'm not more creative!

Kelli said...

I am going to go check it out for sure. What are the monthly payments like?