- Cultivate caring relationships with creators.
- Consider the ergonomics, health impact and accessibility of your workplace.
- Decorate the shop space so it is fresh and alive.
- Respect and maintain tools and software.
- Know where products are made and by whom.
- Understand frustrations and complaints can bring opportunities to create better systems.
- Think holistically; ask: what is this really about?
- Understand that your business is an ecosystem and is part of a wider ecosystem.
- Choose and curate stock mindfully and intentionally.
- Never argue with an artist about their prices.
- Never argue with a customer about your prices.
- Respect the art you sell and be accountable to your role in selling and profiting from it.
- Design policies/systems that are simple and easy to understand and use; practice explaining policies/systems (if it’s hard to explain, ask why).
- Listen to your intuition; listen to your body.
- Listen to staff, listen to customers, listen to creators, listen to partners.
- Ask for what you need.
- Say what you mean.
- Do what you say you are going to do; and don’t make promises you can’t or don’t want to keep.
- Know and respect the bodies at work throughout the entire supply chain including those you’ll never see.
- Learn about the entire life-cycle of packaging and other ‘disposables’.
- Know the products, know what they are, know who created them, know why you stock them.
- Create clear and consistent policies that are easy to follow and make sense for everybody in the ecosystem.
- Ensure systems and schedules can work around sick days, periods, other body cycles that may require rest/time off.
- Create systems that do not require team to choose between their bodies’ needs and earning a living.
- Allow staff to step into, own, and develop their roles.
- Tend plants as a priority, not an afterthought.
- Centre joy and ease in all systems (especially the most mundane).
- Make it fun; find creative outlets in the work; joy is a perfectly good reason!
- Move and stretch regularly.
- TEA.
- Be yourself, use your own voice.
- Remain human and in your body.
- Pee when you need to pee. Eat when you need to eat.
- Question inconsistency.
- Acknowledge fear, bring worries into the open to share and tackle together.
- Acknowledge and discuss problems and look for sustainable solutions.
- Understand that an assistant contributes as much as a manager in terms of making this work.
- Encourage mindful shopping; don’t use ‘must have’, ‘urgent’, ‘need’ or ‘scarcity’ marketing, let products speak for themselves,
- Practice gratitude every day and in every interaction.
- Seek out, stock and promote the creations of marginalised people and emerging artists.
- Don’t compete with artists. Don’t compete with anyone.
- Stay humble.
- Provide helpful, honest information to customers to help them make more intentional, mindful choices.
- Automate repetitive tasks so the valuable resource of staff time and energy is focused on human service.
- Remember that everybody including you is a whole complex human being who yearns to belong.
- Keep staff structures simple and lines of communication clear.
- Price goods so that everybody can be paid enough.
- Pay good and sustainable wages; pay on time.
- Seek local partners, materials and resources and spend money in the local economy.
- Factor in time for maintenance, cleaning and domestic work and value this work as an essential part of the shop.
- Provide music, radio and podcasts if/when wanted.
- Value silence.
- Ensure your website is fully accessible.
- Share systems among team; no hidden knowledge, so we can help each other, cover absence, or grow into new roles.
- Manage customer expectations clearly and fairly.
- Honour a customer’s purchase; decorate packages, include a friendly note, take time to handle and present items with love and care.
- Make time for reflection; be ready to adapt and revise systems to accommodate new wisdom.
- Cultivate abundance consciousness; notice where you feel scarcity or poverty and question why this is and how it affects the shop.
- Allow plenty of time for tasks to be completed. Avoid rushing.
- Avoid future rushing by setting realistic goals and expectations at the outset.
- Practice healthy boundaries.
- Cultivate an intuitive understanding of when and how to apologise.
- Have a clear and simple pricing policy that can be explained to team, customers and creators without shame.
- Talk about the shop’s values regularly and ensure the whole team is familiar and on board with them.
- Invest profit in emerging artists and creators.
- Bank ethically.
- Share behind-the-scenes stories, share the humanity of the business.
- Rethink ‘efficiency’; value humanity and ease over cold hard speed.
- Include surprise touches when it feels good.
- Listen to our bodies; don’t do it if it hurts or feels wrong.
- Question and reduce use of toxic chemicals.
- Check your privilege.Discuss racism, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of oppression and be honest about how these show up in different areas of the business.
- Cultivate an awareness of social capital and power dynamics between team/creators/customers/partners, and their impact in relationships and transactions.
- Encourage eye contact and other forms of consensual contact; know that you are in community.
- Allow people to change, any and every moment.
- Don’t assume anything about anybody, stop judging.
- Ask people’s pronouns; share our pronouns.
- Ask questions; it’s okay not to know something.
- Ask for help when you need it; recognise the generosity in reaching out.
- Ask for feedback.
- Know that you do not do anything alone or unsupported; respect and honour the reciprocity of all your actions
- Share processes with customers so they can see how things work and why things take the time they take.
- Celebrate and honour imperfection.
- Find creative ways to honour and use damaged stock and returns.
- Understand communication as relational not just transactional. Understand that stocking an artist’s work is an act of collaboration.
- Stop and chat.
- Acknowledge and respect that the earth provides all resources.
- Reduce unnecessary consumption, reuse what has use left in it, recycle waste, acknowledge landfill and work to eliminate it.
- Openly honour natural cycles, the moon, the seasons.
- Empower customers by providing the tools/information to handle simple issues/questions for themselves.
- Advocate for artists and small businesses whose work you believe in.
- Share inspiration.
- Pay invoices and bills on time.
- Recognise how money flows in, out and through the shop and talk about this openly.
- Be accountable, take responsibility.
- Open the window.
- Care for stock.
- Celebrate and share success.
- Stroke the cats.
- Collaborate with and spend money with businesses who share our values.
Lineage: Jennifer Armbrust of Sister.is created a writing called ‘100 ways to make more money’. My partner Emma, studying in Jennifer’s Feminist Business School, riffed on this to write ‘100 ways to make a feminist building site’. I riffed on Emma’s piece to write something that felt specific to my own business, the Little Red Tarot Shop.