Today – and last week – I had two days where I really understood why outsourcing could be a good thing.

Gigi and I sell real tangible goods – tie-dye 2.0, also called mudmee tie-dye. Gigi is the part of our enterprise who creates the products and who also takes them out to art and craft show. I just sit in the house and stretch out my feelers to potential customers through the internet.

For me, building the site and programming the whole inventory and order handling was the self-assigned internship to learn how to deal with the web. I also learned a lot about marketing which I did not have to do much of when I was only dealing with very few clients in the high-tech and scientific programming, something I had done before venturing out into the new realm of the web.

These last two weekends we had added two new types of shirts that had already created good responses at shows and now our mailing list responded very well. So, after the waves calmed down a bit, I was working till late into the night to process all those orders.

Initially each and every order was met (by me) with big excitement and a quick trip to the paypal backed to print the shipping label and get those items out. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when there are so many orders that it takes me all night to get them ready for shipping – but I also understand why outsourcing can be a real good thing.

Yet before  I can even consider outsourcing I would probably have to ‘blackbox’ my system some more. As it was all handcrafted, there are still some elements in my system that are only obvious to me – because I built them – but not black-boxy enough, so that I  could just hire somebody and let him or her do the order processing.

In case you are a bit curious what this is all about – I am speaking about Mudmee Tie-dye at  JustZen.