The Overzealous Announcement of an Inexperienced Relocator

The lovely Chicago house that we almost bought.

I am not an experienced relocator. I bought my first house in 2002, in Las Vegas, NV, and even though I’ve traveled the whole wide world, I’ve been in the same home ever since. I busted my buns to keep it post-divorce in 2009. Ken moved in with me, Sophia, and Zia in 2016. We paid the darn thing off in 2018. It’s been a great home, but I am aching for a change.

Ken and I have been surfing Zillow and Redfin for a couple of years, mindfully watching for our perfect next home. We searched Las Vegas and the surrounding areas until Ken asked if I would ever consider moving to Chicago. I met Ken in Chicago through work. I used to partner in an animation shop with Las Vegas and Chicago locations. I love Chicago, and while the winters there are daunting for a girl acclimated to 115º summers, the idea of moving, and the weather, is exciting! Also exciting, Ken’s sister lives there. She and Josh are just about to have the first baby in Ken’s family. Chicago is a lot closer to Ken and Angela’s New Hampshire-based parents, too. It’s a beautiful time to be closer to his family. My parents passed on forever ago, my sister moved to New Mexico two years ago, and my kids are old enough now that the timing for a move feels great.

Once this Chicago decision was a Go, we quickly found something we loved. We’d made an offer on a house that needed a lot of work. The home was listed at $385k. We offered $350k. Offer accepted.

On October 3, Ken and I shared our big plan of moving to Chicago sometime in the next year with our social media communities.

@jaimeejaimee

Cool bonus, we were going to be able to buy this one without selling our Las Vegas home. This is a big deal for us because we’ve got pets and kids in school, and mainly because the Chicago house would be a long renovation project. We could renovate without living in a construction zone, make our move without rushing, then decide if we want to sell or rent out the Vegas house.

We figured roughly $150–$200k worth of work to do (with some additional buffer for unexpected surprises or bonus features), which would take around a year of renovation time to complete. We knew the 2-car garage would be a complete teardown. We knew the stairs on the back of the house would be a complete teardown. The house is a 2-flat. The basement and attic are both unfinished; our goal was to duplex up and down, which would nearly double the square footage of the house. We imagined the lower duplex being the family space. Sophia and Zia would have an “apartment” of their own on the first floor with 2 beds/1 bath. We wanted to finish out the basement, add a bathroom, laundry, and storage, and make plenty of space across the two levels to sprinkle our collection of retro arcade machines. The upper 3 bed/1 bath apartment would be all for Ken and me. We were going to convert the unfinished attic into a master suite and keep the second floor close to what it was. It was perfect for us to have our own office rooms (we both work from home now that we’re closing the shop down) and expand the kitchen into the third room.

Everything was moving along, we had a closing date and all the bank stuff rolling, then the inspection came back. The minimal work needed to make it safe and practical came in around $240k. That was the tippy-top of our renovation budget and didn’t even crack into the sweet renovations I outlined above. Those would still take an additional $150–$200k, which would push the total cost of the house a good deal beyond neighborhood comparables, not to mention a bad financial position to put ourselves in. So, we backed out of the deal.

We are still planning to move, and would still love for the timeline to be in the next year, but the home search begins again. 

I did say I planned to post all the stuff we’re doing and learning along the way.

Lesson Number One:
Don’t share your big moving news until you have the keys in your hands.

🤣❤️
–Jaimee

The Work Beyond #BlackOutTuesday

**Reposted from our Picture This Clothing email from June 15, 2020**

During the past weeks of Black Lives Matter protests, I’ve felt a responsibility to stop talking and listen to the messages and stories being shared. 

We want BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities to know, we see you, we hear you, we value you. Thank you for sharing your experiences and perspectives.  
I know that the work to bring about human equality - to listen, research, learn, self-examine, and understand is not a one or two-week cram-session, but a lifelong, effort-rich endeavor that needs mindful and constant action.

The soul of Picture This Clothing is about embracing and expressing that which makes us different.
We are about open-mindedness, acceptance of differences, and using your individual, innate creativity to inspire and change the world around you. We must continue to grow and demonstrably do better, we are humbly starting here:

Ongoing, Open-minded Learning
Since April, we've done 3x weekly live-streams that explore creative techniques, ideas, innovations and how those can be applied to designing your own clothes. Our material is designed for kids and to encourage imagination. We are committing our Thursday live-streams to learning-out-loud about BIPOC artists and innovators. We welcome feedback, questions, and suggestions to grow forward together.
Join us here every Sun/Tues/Thurs at 11am PT:
Facebook (94,241 followers) 
Youtube (191 subscribers)

Donations/Support
While we’re a tiny, self-funded team, we have committed to putting 10% of all face-covering sales each month back into causes we care about. The causes we choose rotate monthly and mindfully include BIPOC and underrepresented nonprofit organizations. 
Our list of orgs is updated monthly, and can be found in the product description of our face coverings page here.

Personal Work
On the personal level, I will be doing more research, questioning, fact-checking, listening, and understanding. I'm a frequent sharer of sharing my own naivaté, and learning-out-loud, even when it's embarrassing and often uncomfortable. 
I will be writing more about my own journey, sometimes these things are a separate experience than should be represented through Picture This Clothing. I invite you to join me on my personal blog here (no link because you are HERE). ;)

If you are seeking resources, information, or wondering what you can do, I encourage you to start here.

We will continue to listen and examine our own beliefs with a humility, an open heart, and an open mind. 

With Care & Gratitude,

Jaimee Newberry
Co-founder, Picture This Clothing

Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back

Building a new company is fun. That is not a sarcastic statement, I genuinely love it. It’s also painful, scary, frustrating, and soul-crushing sometimes.

At Picture This Clothing we’ve been working for MONTHS on new product development of one — yes ONE — product, specifically. We got to the point where we were just about ready to launch when we got some size/fit feedback from one of our awesome product testers that two of the kids sizes didn’t fit well. We tested them with a couple more kids and determined that the patterns were just not usable. We tried again, and again, unusable which meant we had to start over from the beginning of what had thus far been a 4-month process. Ugh.

But so goes business, right? And life.

We learned a few things from the first go-around. And learned much sooner (just under 1 month in this time) that our second go-around wasn’t going to work out, either. At this moment of realization I laid on the floor pretty dramatically and stared up at the ceiling wondering if we really will ever overcome this obstacle. Developing new products for Picture This Clothing is not as simple as picking out some patterns from Joanne’s and deciding to make them. It’s also not buying a bunch of inexpensive blank products from overseas mass-manufacturers. It is a much, much more complex challenge to solve to do it the way we believe is the RIGHT way, which is developing patterns that meet our technical specifications, then printing, sublimating, cutting, and sewing in-house in our little Las Vegas shop. Quality matters. Doing it right matters. But damn, it sure can be frustrating sometimes.

We learned a few more things from takes two and three. And we’ve started again. Our new product launch is delayed indefinitely and it kills my soul a lot.

It’s easy to be caught up in what isn’t working when you’re in the thick of it. On the contrast, one of my favorite quotes:

“Success hides problems” -Ed Catmull

This contrast is what makes me grateful for the ups and downs both in life and in business. The “ups” keep us going and offer fuel to get us through the down times. The “downs” highlight what is broken and needs to be fixed so the next “up” matches the previous, if not taking us even higher.

It’s important to stop and look back at how far you’ve come once in a while. Then keep going.

Year one was overwhelming in its own way. We launched with a proof-of-concept and when it went viral the same day, it was like a thunderstorm of learning as fast as we could. We’re so grateful for such an electrifying start and we know we wouldn’t be where we are now without that, but WOW. It really did take us that first year just to get our bearings.

Last year (year two) when we decided to take on manufacturing it was daunting. None of us had manufacturing experience but every manufacturing shop we visited, learned about, or studied came with its own challenges and shortcomings. But none seemed to meet our needs in a way way we felt matched our core values and priorities.

When we stop and think about what our little team has accomplished it’s a pretty darn good track record in our not-quite three years as a company. Here’s a recap of some things we’re super proud to have done so far:

• Launched our “idea-baby” our own way, it went viral the day it launched

• Received “buzz” from the likes of TechCrunch, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, FastCompany, BoredPanda, ScaryMommy, Disney’s Babble.com and a whole bunch more

• Not one single dime of outside investment

• $1.2mm in sales in our first 18 months

• Built our own proprietary order mgmt software and developed our own tools for image processing

• Brought manufacturing 100% in-house in Las Vegas, NV:

  • found a warehouse

  • bought all our equipment with no loans

  • we print, sublimate, hand cut, sew, and pack every single piece in our shop

• Built/launched our own custom Affiliate program

• Earned a strong foundation of very positive customer reviews

• Cultivated a Facebook community from 0 to +86k and Instagram from 0 to +14k, full of names we’ve come to know and genuinely love talking to through behind-the-scenes live streams

Each bullet-point came with an enormous amount of work and I have to acknowledge that’s not too shabby for a team of 6 in less than 3 years. I’m proud of us.

So, I guess as we enter our third year it’d be crazy to think everything should run beautifully perfect with no big challenges. The thought of things running perfectly makes me laugh out loud. I don’t know what “running perfectly” really means, all I know is that I like what we’re working on. It’s hard and it’s worth it.

I’m grateful for this team I get to work with every day. I’m grateful for how much I’ve learned and continue to learn. I’m grateful that the thing we make is something that brings a lot of imagination, color, and joy to a small pocket of the world.

The struggle is real, and we’ll never know how much we really can accomplish without new challenges arising. We keep moving forward as hard as we can until we cannot. We’ll take a minute to look back every once in a while, and have enormous gratitude for the opportunity to do things our own way for however long that may be.

<3
Jaimee

_________________________

Ed Catmull quote via http://www.creativityincbook.com/catmull/

Going Back to the Start

The interesting thing with the idea of going back to the start is that you’re never the same as when you started. You’re different. You’ve changed. You’ve been through stuff, you’ve learned, you’ve experienced.

In my coaching days, one of my clients used the analogy of a high dive at a swimming pool to talk about pushing through things that were daunting. I loved that analogy and ran with it a bit for the sake of thinking through the process of starting new challenges and overcoming obstacles.

You climb the ladder to the highest high dive you see. It’s scary and exhausting, but you climb. Not everyone will climb with you, some will cheer you on from the sidelines, some may laugh at you or call you crazy, some will do their own thing and never even see you. But you climb and eventually you reach the top of the ladder and you slowly walk out to the end of the board. You can see so much from up there. You stand there, staring out, looking down. The fear of jumping grips you. Some get scared and climb back down the ladder. Not you. Eventually, you take a big breath in and you jump. You feel the air, anticipate the cool slap of breaking through the water. When you come up for air, it’s not just air that you’re breathing in, you’re inhaling a huge accomplishment. You did it.

You can repeat this process on the same high dive. The second time it’s still a little scary, but you’ve done it before so you know you’re capable. You can do it over and over. Sometimes the leap isn’t graceful. Sometimes you hit the water wrong and it hurts. You learn from the experience and go again.

For some, this will be high enough. You become a master, you teach others how to do what you’ve done. You push the boundaries of all the variations and ways possible to jump from this one amazing height.

Others crave more, and more will always exist. The need to search for higher dives will overcome you. You’ll search, you’ll find incrementally higher places to climb and leap from. High dive boards, cliff diving, sky diving…

Each time you’re standing at the base of another ladder staring up, it feels a bit insurmountable. As long as we start -one ladder rung at a time and don’t give up -you’ll eventually get to the top. Once you’re there the perspective shifts, the focus shifts.

The climb is a little different each time. Each time you figure out how to get to the top as you go, but you rely upon skills earned from all your previous experience. Each time you reach the top, you’re tired but thrilled by the view. Each time you get that knot in your stomach as you look to the water and you decide if you’re going to jump or not. The closer you get to the edge the more you feel your heart beating inside your throat.

You jump. 

You do it all over again.

…

-Jaimee

Checking Myself

It’s January 20, 2019 and I’m not sure if I’m alone on this or not but… 
Are you kidding me? Where has this month gone?

Being as the time is going to fly like this, it seems prudent to revisit my “3 Words” <—that’s a link in case you want to check out my original 3 Words for 2019 post.

I realize that sometimes we set intentions or goals, maybe even resolutions, but come February or March we’ve moved on, because life. I think doing an end-of-month review of my 3 Words might be a really solid way to keep them in the forefront of my mind. And bonus, by writing about my 3 words with some frequency I create little footprints that I can look back upon and acknowledge that some progress was made instead of trying to make myself feel badly for not doing enough.

I know my progress has not been huge and my first instinct is to feel disappointed in myself. As with all things, I can choose how I’m going to feel about where I’m at, and instead of feeling badly for not doing more I’m going to feel good about making any progress at all.

Let’s take a look:

Organize.

I think Ken has made more visible progress on this than I have, and I don’t even think he picked words of intention for the year. BUT I did make some small strides forward.

• The File Cabinet

I’m a pro at starting small. :)
I cleaned out and organized 3 folders in my file cabinet. Sure, I would rather wait until I bring the label maker home from the office to finish (excuses), but I started and those three folders make me smile. I can’t wait for the other 200 or so to be just as caught-up. If I can do only 3 folders a month, this “organize” thing could take a while, but then… maybe if I’m actually doing 3 folders a month, this becomes a tiny fixture of routine in my life and the “overwhelm” part never happens again. Let’s see how this unfolds this year.

• Finances

I got my finances all organized. I’ve never been terribly unorganized financially, but I like getting my taxes done asap, so those are ready for my accountant. I love making financial spreadsheets, it’s sort of a weird fascination I’ve had since I learned how to use Excel way back in the day, so I’ve also plotted out my financial status and objectives for the year.

• My Medicine Cabinet

I have a pretty large medicine cabinet/mirror dealy in my bathroom over my sink. It wasn’t a mess, but it had stuff like gummy nail polish and way-outdated “deluxe samples” of face creams and whatnot. I emptied the whole cabinet, cleaned each shelf and put back only what I use. It’s a small thing but it makes me breathe easier. When I open this cabinet now, I actually smile.

• The Office

We moved out of our small office and into our bigger office. I had no idea how much stuff we had until I saw it all piled in the middle of the floor of our once super spotless new space. We picked up a few more Ikea shelves and started the epic organization project, but we’ve a long way to go on this one. Baby steps!

• Writing

I’m writing! The goal is every Sunday of 2019. If more happens, awesome. So far, there’s not been more and I’m OK with that for now. It feels really good to be doing any at all! The more I do it, the more organized I start to feel.

I would love to say I did a whole bunch of other stuff but this was as far as focused organizational tasks have gone thus far. 

As I write, I’m remembering how helpful it is to breaking items out like this in writing. This was normal for me once upon a time, feels good to strike back up again!

Expand.

I closed out a few things and said “no” to a few other things in the first couple of weeks this month. I also said “yes” to a few things. I’m slowly reaching out to find the edges of this space I’ve carved out. This intention I’ve set for myself to expand is a bit tricky because I feel like I’m learning and trying to figure out exactly what I mean by it as I go. February could be shaping up as a month of making lists. Probably should’ve started that in January. We still have some days left in January… 

Anyway, this one will be interesting to experience and I will continue documenting how it all plays out. Maybe by the end of the year we’ll have something nifty to get excited about and a whole lot of learning under our belt! Maybe we’ll just have a bunch of lists.

Presence.

I’ve had a couple great written exchanges with people I’ve not talked to in years. I’ve worked on little things like leaving my phone in the other room, or just putting it down more often. Zia and I have an ongoing battle of who’s better at Clue.
There are a few people on my list to reach out to sooner than later. 

I feel like I have a lot of growth to do in this area, yet at the same time, I feel like I have some very awesome, meaningful, and mindful relationships. I don’t want to move too quickly on expanding my circle until I know that every person that I view as being in my circle knows they are, and feels they are. I have a lot of work to do on that.

…

Reaching the end of my recap and looking back on it, it feels more significant to me than it felt when I started this post. Even though my progress was relatively small, it was small in several places and THAT is progress.

Did you set intentions or goals for 2019? How are things going for you?

Little Kids Wearing Makeup

When we launched Picture This Clothing in August of 2016, things blew up virally on the internet before we had a chance to even process what was happening. The internet being what it is, I got to hear lots of rage about what a really horrible, horrible person I was, and message I was sending, to feature little girls wearing makeup on our website. For the record, I didn’t put makeup on the kids on our website.

Here’s the story.

We launched Picture This Clothing as a proof-of-concept back in August of 2016. For proofs-of-concept you do as many things as swiftly and on the cheap as possible just to get the idea out into the world. We still did it with care for quality and detail, but one of the things we did as swiftly and inexpensively as we could was take our own website/product photos. We didn’t hire models or a photographer. I had an iPhone 6 and two seven-year-olds eager to help out.

When we first launched, we only offered dresses. T-shirts are far more complex garments to make (all of our garments are cut & sew, we don’t use pre-assembled clothing), so we figured we’d test the dresses first and see how it went, if things went well we’d add t-shirts, and so-on. Additionally, this concept was born out of a dress I’d made for my youngest daughter Zia from a drawing she’d done, so dresses just seemed to make sense as a starting point.

Zia’s best friend Gigi had spent the night, her parents had given permission for her to participate with Zia in a photoshoot for our little idea. The girls knew it was “picture day”, so after breakfast I asked them to go get picture-ready. In my mind, this meant brushing their hair and teeth. Gigi and Zia interpreted it differently. They vanished for a good hour, I was sidetracked getting the space ready for photo-taking but eventually they emerged “ready” for their big photoshoot…

Please don’t focus on the creepy butter-knives, we don’t make habit of playing with kitchen cutlery in our home. They asked if they could use them specifically to take “scary photos”, I said yes since they’d done all this fine work on their faces and costumes. Gigi and Zia have been best friends since they met at day-care when they were two-and-a-half years old. This, to me, (sans butter-knives) is a totally normal morning with these two. They play. They dress up. They imagine. They giggle. They dream.

But ya, I had some face scrubbing to do to get them to the point where we could take the photos that were used on the website. I really thought I’d done a pretty good job considering where we started. But there’s always stuff no one sees.

Zia and Gigi were seven in these photos. They use makeup for play, not for self-esteem. I think it’s great.

I welcome all thoughts on kids and makeup!

❤
Jaimee Newberry

Zia on the Picture This Clothing home page on launch day, August 17, 2016

Gigi on the Picture This Clothing “Dress” landing page on launch day, August 17, 2016

My 3 Words for 2019

A few years back my friend Daniel Steinberg introduced me to Chris Brogan’s “3 Words Process” while we were experimenting with our own TinyChallenges podcast.

I sat down to write yesterday because writing (again) is one of the things I want to do for myself in the coming year. I decided that one day out of every week in 2019 (Sundays) I would use my currently-dedicated gym time to write, that way there would be no excuse about not having time - the time was carved out two-and-a-half years ago and healthily maintained as gym time. I didn't foresee a swap-out of one thing for another being the challenge it was. It totally was, though. I did NOT want to get out of bed yesterday.

Once I peeled myself out of bed I decided to write about 2018. I bored myself with my own words and thoughts after about 20 minutes and quickly distracted myself by checking-in on work. 3 hours later I was still working on work things that could've waited. I guess I'm a bit out of practice.

While I'm discouraged that writing didn't feel wonderful and freeing and like the only thing ever that I want to do for the rest of my life, as it used to... this, like many things, will take me some time to rebuild a recurring practice around and I choose to be OK with that. 

I thought about my three words for a long time. At first, I had eight words and it was tough for me to focus on them long enough to prioritize them. I decided that today I will make time. So here's where I've landed (in no particular order). 
...
Organize.
Since the launch and viral chaos of Picture This Clothing in August of 2016, almost everything else took a back seat. At first, the company completely took over our home. Eventually, we subleased a small space near our manufacturer, then in 2018, we took on a lease of our own and it's an amazing space! 

My home, however, has never fully recovered. My mind has never fully recovered. This year I will get a handle on the many bits that feel like a straight-up 10,000 lb glitter explosion. 

Expand.
In prior years it was a goal to make more space in my life. I believe I have done that to quite a solid degree since I started that journey in 2013. Creating space, in my own definition, was about hugging-in and focusing only on what is important. Clearing out the noise. Saying "no" more so that there is space to breathe, feel, and exist with pointed intention. Now it's time to expand mindfully within the space I have carved out. I made the mistake last year of expanding too quickly beyond the space. While that had some benefits, it also had some enormous negative consequences. Hopefully, this has been a well-learned lesson that bears no repeating. 

Presence.
Relationships require cultivating, care, attention, and presence. I want to improve my presence in the relationships I most value. Life is too short not to put more focus here.
...

While I've never been much of a "resolutions" kind-a-girl, I'm a huge advocate for goals and writing things down - for me writing is the clarity of vision that defines doing versus not doing. :) 

Happy 2019, friends!

Jaimee

A very quick recap of 2018:

• With the exception of slowing down over Christmas break, I continued my streak of going to the gym at least 4 times per week. I’ll hit the 3-year mark of this routine in May of 2019.

• Got an incredible office space and established our own manufacturing shop (we print, cut, sew, thread-clip, label, pack, and ship every single piece in-house) for Picture This Clothing free of any bank-loans or outside investment.

• Invited to Shark Tank. Went and failed miserably. It will never air but was a great experience.

• Experimented a ton (and had lots of fun) with videos for Picture This Clothing.

• As far as I know, my kids and Ken don’t hate me and I think they’re all amazing.

• Started speaking at conferences again.