This week, Tiffani, Julianne, and I traveled to Atlanta for market to buy for Spring/Summer of next year. Going to market is definitely one of my favorite parts of this job; I was born to be a buyer!  But while going to market seems like all fun and games, it's a grind, and you feel like you've lost your mind just hours in. I absolutely love it, and I also feel completely overwhelmed and exhausted by it. You really can't understand it until you're in the thick of it, but here's a quick rundown of our trip.

I have no idea how many brands showcase their lines at the America's Mart, but it feels like millions. This week was the Atlanta Gift Show, so in addition to all the clothes being shown, there's an entire building next to the one where we go, filled with homeware and decor. We hunker down in Building 2, which has 14 floors with hundreds of brands on each level. Floor 13 is Children's World, where all our children's lines are hosted. I'm grateful that Tiffani and Julianne are with me; we make a great team. Tiffani is so detailed and organized; she checks and triple-checks orders, controls all inventory, and keeps the website up to date (a full-time, relentless job), she has a knack for knowing what will make kids happy and is beloved by every child that walks into the store. Julianne, who worked at Why Not?, knows how to pick best sellers; she is a calm, creative force, merchandise extraordinaire, and she loves to run reports and crunch numbers.

We flew in Monday night so that we could hit America's Mart bright and early the next day. I like to start our market trips with our biggest buys first. Get the big chunks taken care of, and then fill in from there. We do three big appointments on our first day, and it takes 9-10 hours, with a quick sandwich and any available cookie devoured when we have the opportunity. We kicked the day off with a three-hour appointment with our biggest brand, The Beaufort Bonnet Company, at 9am, followed by a visit to the Summer Place Showroom, which sells 15-20 different brands, and then closed out with three and a half hours at the Little English showroom and their sister line Bisby, who always have cold Rose waiting for us at the end of the day. We didn't plan ahead for dinner, so when we got back to our hotel room at 6:30pm starving, it was a long wait everywhere. I always feel like I need an enormous hamburger to recover from the day. We ordered Uber eats, bought some fine wine from the CVS across the street, and went over linesheets from that day, trying to digest what we saw.

Wednesday morning started at 8am with our favorite whimsical prints by James and Lottie. Then we hunkered down for three hours of "Boy Mom Maura, Designer Extraordinaire" at Luigi brand, where I get to pick exactly what cars, trucks, airplanes, dinos, and designs I want and on what color shirts with what color piped collars. Tiffani almost fainted the first time she witnessed the chaos of me picking out our buy, but now she methodically reins me in, and we work in an organized manner. My humble brag: it's a feeding frenzy when the Luigi order is delivered at the store - my fellow boy moms approve of these classic play clothes and scoop them up as soon as we get them in! The majority are custom to our store.

After Luigi, my attention span really started to dwindle. Even after another cup of coffee, Tiffani and Julianne could tell I was losing it, but we had six hours and four more appointments to go. We pushed forward with picking baby clothes from Kissy Kissy, a new tween line from James and Lottie (get excited, VERY excited for this one!) and end the day with Bella Bliss. We absolutely adore Bella Bliss, and our rep loves to take us out to fun dinners in the Atlanta area. I'll admit, it's hard to extract me from heading straight back to the hotel room, even for a great dinner. I'm so lame. Having a quiet hotel room away from kids is a HUGE perk to this trip (this job!). Julianne and Tiffani will drink wine and hang out all night, but all I want to do is sit in a quiet room and have a good night's sleep.

Usually, we would stay another night and have another morning of appointments, but I had to be home Thursday to head out to Pidgeon Forge, Tennessee, so that I could enjoy Dollywood with ten of my college girlfriends - maybe a recap for next month's post? A 9pm flight home got me back in Alexandria way past my bedtime.

So that was really fun picking things out! But now, the real work begins. Budgets, delivery times, BUDGETS. We have to sort through our orders and figure out what we really need. Did we get enough sizes? Enough baby? The right Easter dresses? Too many red, white, and blue looks for the 4th of July? How many brands did I order red shorts from, and why don't we ever seem to have enough? I'm not a numbers person, and I hate excel charts, but it's a very important part of the job, and luckily Tiffani and Julianne are angels sent to me from heaven - they will plug thousands of items into purchase orders so we can analyze what we picked. We'll fly back to Atlanta in August for a day (not all of our lines are ready in July, but if you wait to do your entire buy in August, some of the items won't be available, so you have to order at the Gift Show), punch in more purchase orders and we'll be all set for Spring deliveries to start arriving in December.

And then you hope you get what you ordered, in the delivery window you need it. In our appointments, we're given a linesheet, and our rep goes through the line showing us samples of what the item will look like. Sounds simple enough. In reality, not all samples make it to market, and some you see aren't cute at all in the showroom, but then they are photographed beautifully in marketing materials. Customers complain about why we didn't get this amazing dress. OR we'll love a style, and when it's delivered to the store, the fit is absolutely funky, or the fabric changed, and it's no good.  OR timing is completely delayed or way too early (one Halloween delivery this year came in early June!).  But we roll with it! We have great relationships with our brands, and more things definitely go right than wrong.

The longer I own the business, the better our buys have gotten. I trust my intuition more, and our store selection has gotten better and better (and bigger and bigger due to demand). Fall is arriving daily, and I can't wait for you to see what's coming!