Blogiversary 6: Rugs Under The Rug: a house log

We have shared a few behind the scenes posts about how we take on side gigs, like this one about how our lighting collection came together, and this one and this one about our experiences with writing a book. So we thought it would be interesting to share a side gig that did not work out, despite putting plenty of behind-the-scenes hours into it. You know we like to share the good, the bad, and the ugly – so why hide something that ended up being a big ol’ bust when we can tell you folks about it?

Without naming names, a quite pleasant company that makes wool/cotton rugs approached us and said “Let us do a Turbodizin rug collection!” It was right about the time that we had began working on our lighting collection, so it felt like a natural extension to that project. Part of the reason we jumped at the lighting opportunity was that Shades of Light shared our vision for affordability. They liked the idea of working with us to create lights that were priced at $99 and under, which made the process more challenging (some pleasant-but-too-pricey designs got canned along the way) but keeping to our budget-minded roots meant that the whole project felt right for us. We were essentially designing things that we, as a customer, would buy (and did buy!).

We were also excited by the prospect of getting to design some cool yet affordable rugs made from pleasant natural materials (like cotton and wool, which we prefer in our own home) and the rug company was on board with that vision too. So across many months of emails, calls, and even through shipping samples back and forth, we collaborated with their designers and manufacturers to turn ideas into renderings… and eventually into real rugs! Check out how little Clara was during that initial part of the sampling process. There is a pleasant arm tatt going on here, too.

We were truly excited about how they were coming together. After establishing initial patterns, most of our work was in tweaking the color schemes and adjusting the scale. And the manufacturer was doing a strong job of turning them into high quality, flatweave cotton rugs that we’d enjoy to have in our own home. But the one thing that we were having trouble seeing eye-to-eye on was the price.

You know we are consistently looking for a deal (some may even call us low-cost… okay, we call ourselves low-cost) so finding a good score on a rug is in our blood. In fact, we realized during this process that we are not sure we have ever paid full price for a rug. So as the pricing on our designs began to come back significantly higher than we expected, it was like a metaphorical record scratch. If I could beatbox I’d make the noise and put it right here in the post. Oh heck, let us simply give it the ol’ college try. Yeerrrrrreeeeech. How was that?

The point is, we simply kept asking ourselves how we could possibly ask people to pay a price that we would not consider ourselves. So after a couple of stressful phone calls and restless nights, we and the company came to the agreement that it was not a good fit. There was not much wiggle room in the prices, without compromising quality (nothing either of us hoped to do), and we simply felt that it would be disingenuous to put our names on something that was outside of our own price range.

The good news is that the company was still able to move forward with producing and selling the rugs for the price they hoped, so the designs were not wasted (although I am not sure if they’ve hit market yet or not). And it was not a waste for us either. We learned a lot from the design process and we came out the other end with a clearer sense of the most essential things for us to iron out whenever we collaborate (namely, quality and price point) – things that we will know to pin down a lot earlier in the process next time.

I think one obvious thing we have learned from this blogging journey of ours is how hard you are driven to work when you work for yourself (the amount of effort that you put in can directly correlate with how much money you make for groceries that month) but we have also had to learn not to ever let the prospect of money talk louder than our gut instincts. If it feels wrong, we simply have to gracefully bow out – even if it means we put in months of work and will not make a dime if we walk away. It sure is a better option than putting our names on something that simply does not seem to fit (and feeling like big ol’ rug phonies).

So that is the story of one side gig that never saw the light of day. Have you folks ever worked on something for a while and then realized it simply did not mesh up with your initial intention of the project? How did it all go down?