Scrap Outside the Box!

Q:: Let me start this interview with the name of your store. Scrap Outside the Box - quite a unique name. How did you get this name and what is the reason you used it?
Danielle::
You know... I'm actually the 4th owner of this store. I've only owned this store since June 2008 and I honestly don't know [laugh] who came up with the name. I'm sure it's just a creative process and usually it has a lot to do with what other sites and names that had been taken already. The third owner is co-owner with me right now. Andrea is the original but I'm not sure how she came up with the name but I like it.

Q:: So you have a co-owner in your store?
Danielle::
Yes, I have. She does mostly admin type of stuff and I try to do the marketing portion of it.

Q:: What made you want to own a digital scrapbooking store?
Danielle::
For most people in this industry, it's a passion. Now that we've been in it for five years, I was a designer before I became the owner and this is the only store I ever sold at. It has a very good community and the people are very friendly. In a lot of other stores, people say you kind of go there and you put your kits and then you're gone. There's not a whole lot of interaction between the designers and creative teams. I found them online, I like the community, that's why I became a designer and when the store owner decided to sell, I was like, "Whoa! This is a great opportunity for me." It's like a passion. I'm not passionate about anything else other than food [both laugh]. I also love to work from home which is a great plus and I get to put the hours that I want to put which you can't really say in most other businesses. So it just seemed so natural.

Q:: You also offer quite a lot of free tutorials. Does this help bring more customers or what is the purpose behind it?
Danielle::
The tutorials have been up there since the beginning. Instead of competing with other stores for the same customers, we try to get people that aren't customers yet. They are not digital scrapbookers. Many of them are traditional paper scrapbookers. We try to turn them into digital scrapbookers and the easiest way to do that is by offering them the means to become one and that's by teaching them. I've written a number of tutorials myself and we also have a challenge called 'Tricks of the Trade'. What we do, again, for free, we have a chat once a month where they can learn a

different technique live. I give them a tutorial they can look at and this gives them the opportunity to ask questions and to get examples, things like that. We want to educate our customers so they can be better customers. This way they can tell what a good quality kit is.

Q:: Did you expect when you took over this store that it would be like now during the last year? Danielle::
No... It’s funny. You have a big expectation when you take over a store, doesn't matter what company you work for. You have ideas that you want to put in place.

A lot of time, some of the dreams are crushed [laugh]. You discover there's a reason why you can't do some of the things you want to do, monetarily, because of software limitations, things like that. I definitely made my mark on the store. I try new things, some of them work and some don't. Part of being a store owner is wanting to take risks to see if they can better the store. In the digital environment, you can make mistakes and if they don't work out, it's not as costly as if you would be printing something. Once that's printed, that money is gone. But if you try to do something online and it doesn't work, you just change it. No big deal. So we try a lot of new things and in fact right now we are getting ready to introduce a subscription service giving people the opportunity to get a lot of downloads at a very inexpensive price, because the economy is not doing very well right now. People that are still interested in digital scrapbooking are looking for value. We are trying to bring that value to our store so that they won't go to other stores.

Q:: Do you discuss these ideas and challenges first with your designers or are you the primary force behind it and just pursue it with them?
Danielle::
I like to think that we (Tanya and I) are the store owners, BUT we're NOT going to tell our designers what to do. If my designers are not happy, we don't have designers. We have a group where we e-mail back and forth on a daily basis and we always throw the ideas out to them. Sometimes we have to veto but usually it is a group effort. Everybody agrees and it's the best thing to do. They give me ideas. They may think of something I may not have thought of.

Q:: There are many people doing digital and traditional scrapbooking. When you go out and other people tell you that they work for this company and that company and you say you are a digital scrapbook store owner, how do they normally respond to you?
Danielle::
"I always wanted to do that!", "You've got to show