Although I still have ton of things on my mind, I finally set aside some time to look back over the past 1 year to count my blessings. I haven’t really had time to catch a breather to evaluate the year, celebrate and be thankful.

I finally completed my degree finally after delaying it for so many years. (Wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to do – working and studying. Didn’t help that the school kept having random impromptu classes which were “compulsory”) YAY! I officially have a proud Asian dad, whom always wanted me to be a degree holder.

I’m a workaholic. There are always never ending ideas in my head bugging me and waiting for me to execute. Sometimes I wonder if only I had more than 24 hours, or if I could sleep lesser, maybe if I’ve unlimited resources to execute every single thing in my head would I be much happier?

This year, I was forced to focus a lot more on Actseed Co. It’s come a long way from a little project to now, a company that I could actually afford to employ people. We did our first public event this year, a booth at Robinsons Market in Suntec. We didn’t even know how to go about setting up our store at first. It took us more than an hour to get everything “right”. Well, there’s always a first time for everything!

We also participated in our first Public Garden. It was so crazy busy that we didn’t have time to rest our feet. It was an intense two days but we really enjoyed it even though we are so tired by the time it ended. This was also the first time I witnessed Actseed’s followers getting very excited when they spotted the brand at the market. In the later half of Dec, we were also invited to Cornerstone Christmas Event to set up a store there too, and by then we were getting much quicker and smoother in setting up and managing the events.

I’m really thankful the friends that went go out of their way to help me, to promote the brand and just supporting me in every way that they could. Even if they had done the minimal I would have been so thankful but so many of the went above and beyond by helping me send the items down, do setup, tear down, stood for hours helping me sell my products and burning their weekends.

Putting myself out there in public selling my goods wasn’t my cup of tea. To be honest, I would very much rather hide behind my computer to design new products. However, one thing I gained after putting myself out was valuable feedback from my customers – what products they were looking for, their decision making process in shopping. Something I was so reluctant to do ended up giving me even more inspiration to create better products and ideas behind my screen.

I hope to learn more through new experiences in the New Year.

Stay tuned for more exciting stuff coming to our online store in a few weeks’ time!