Perfection in Daily Life Or Not

Decades ago, trying emulate Martha Stewart was all the thing.  It was a lifestyle of just the right furniture, linens, towels, bedding.  I learned about furniture restoration and peonies.  Everything was always just so.  It was always the perfect never a crumb showing or drop of blueberry pie filling falling on the table cloth.  It was silver, not stainless.  It was about using cloth napkins with rings instead of paper ones.  It was how to do something, make something and be some one who lived a refined life far above the hoi polloi of being common.  I did find cutting paper to the size of each picture really did make it easier to figure out where to hang it.

Didn't have kids so it was much easier to create a series of perfect moments.  With kids, they need food and now so dainty, crafted small portions with just so moments tended to go out the window.  A lot of things became more about real daily life with little or no resemblance to polished photos once poured over.

Since then the world has essentially had a major flip flop of how similar information is now released.  We have social media (Insta, youtube and X to name a few).  People are pitching their knowledge which can reach someone at any moment of day or night.  No more waiting for a tv show, magazine or staged gossip mag.  Nope.  Instant gratification available any where, any time.  And comment away in an echo chamber instead of a soap box in the city park in hopes someone from the local tv channel happens by.

Another major plot twist is the designation of job as now Influencer (or the people who support the Influencer, content creator kind of thing).  That's supposed to be really big money ... providing you find the right deal.  Even though, on average, people may make $65K a year, there are still a vast number who counter balance the ones who make the big big bucks like a million.  Each day new people are entering the field in hopes they will make it big.  

Translation: there are a lot of people who are also in competition with you to get deals and new ones entering the crowded field hourly.  In some ways, being an influencer is like being sent on go-see for a model or try-out for an actor.  But now you in competition all day long and with people you won't meet or get to know in the waiting room.  And, with the internet, it is really hard to have something disappear if you say/show/do something not good.

This leads us to the latest - shop offerings - clothing, jewelry and links where she can be paid some commission.  The accountant in me is wondering just what their mark up is to be profitable if they can afford to pay her a commission and still have have profit to cover all their costs (the making, packing, storing, shipping).  

A lot of ink about how profitable this will be for her/them but we've read that before with other ventures of theirs.  Just even the leaving had people making all kinds of forecasts of their profitability.  But that didn't work out after covid struck.  Since then there have not been a lot of sustained effort in any one direction so it's kind of hard to tease out if covid was really that much of THE show stopper or just a speed bump in what became a pattern of start, stop, start something else, promote it and then start something else.  

And, now there are a lot of critics who are using their platforms to point out problems and what not.  They are getting louder and gaining ink or video as well.  Not everyone does well with criticism even if it is trying to be helpful (or not helpful).  I had no idea that hate watching is apparently a thing now.

Dealing with criticism.  Not easy.  Not easy at all.  And yet, if you look at people who waited it out,  say Camilla, Catherine or Sophie, they all walked through sustained fire, held their head up and kept moving/doing what they were doing.  They didn't wallow in victimhood as if they were the first person ever to be criticized.  

Now that I think about it, I think back to Spare where he cannot wrap his head around the idea of people in his own family trying to tell him to blow it off nor get invested in trying to control it.  

I suspect that, as part of managing him as a kid, his image of the whole of him being the joker, the happy-go-lucky doesn't have the forbidding future of the UK on his shoulders, there may have been a focus on the more positive spin to the behaviors instead of how he was sometimes less than sunny, nice to be around, thoughtful and certainly not spiteful.  Looking back to his own description of the playing ball in the hallways meant there was no consideration of any other people other than we are here and we are here to have fun.  Or the nasty stories about his teachers or the staff.  He told us that - not them.

So when the criticism started flying at her, maybe the family's response of no big deal, we all have had this ... that this happens to us suddenly became very real.  And now personal.  And now not something anyone could ever wave a magic wand to make go away.  And if neither of them had much experience is learning to navigate criticism, then it is the blind leading the blind, both getting more mad with it all getting very cyclical in how they responded to it as each less than perfect about how they are piece dropped.

That was a rabbit hole.  Back to her shop.

Not reading a lot about independent eaters talking about how they like the fruit spread.  Seems that a lot were expecting more and didn't like what they did try.

As for the clothing, not a lot of options which might be expected when starting out.  One of the problems with clothing is that there is no longer any definite season start date.  I forget why but it means that there really new stuff arriving each week instead of a whole reset one day each season.  

What this means is no resting the laurels at any time.  New deals will always need to be in motion and how the sales are progressing may indicate future or not involvement with her for the current vendors or the need to go out and find new partners.

Actually everything is like that - always needing to be working on the next thing to be added whether it be clothing, jewelry, jam (fruit spread) or a pod cast.  

We don't know, goodness knows there hasn't been a lot of ink about the clothing, but it isn't always easy to get this product made in America so the tariffs may factor into what happens long term there.  And the spread or the honey, are those segments going to be enough to keep the rest of the company all that profitable?