4 Names

Good Sunday morning sweet prayer partners. Waking up on October 19th after sharing the last two days with women from southern Illinois at a boutique market about how their shopping can change a life in Honduras, I'm grateful that this is the place God has put me for this season of my life.  But God and I had some serious conversations on the road each day in the 2 hour drive over and back. You see, there are 4 women from Faith Home that are currently needing jobs and we are just trying to hire 1 more this year. This breaks my heart and I feel inadequate because the sales can't support 4 more. My heart literally aches because I know how desperately these women need a job. I've been there and I've seen women on the street with children, begging, or worse. Since my mom and dad were there at Faith Home, it feels like members of my family that are hurting like this.

So what is there to do? We currently have a 3 branch marketing plan: online sales (that's you by the way if you are reading this, you are on our website), in-person markets, and wholesale to stores.  Currently, there's not any more weekends for me to do in person before Christmas, I'm booked for all of them. So that market is tapped. The concentration then becomes online (which requires advertising spend) and wholesale (which grows through calling new stores and attending trade shows).  We will have an advertising budget for marketing through Christmas, so please pray that the dollars return orders. We do need a 2x - 3x return on that investment for it to be profitable. And I have lots of stores to call over the next 2 weeks to make sure they are stocked for Christmas, plus 1 more trade show in November.  Please pray for some new breakthrough accounts. 

To move to the next level, these two areas have to grow. More than just me selling in markets is required for these 4 names to be seated around this table.  All of our ladies that know and love Faith Home, and know and love Alegria can become a force of support by deciding that they will accessorize with Alegria, they will gift shop with Alegria, and they will tell their churches and their families and their coworkers about Alegria and encourage them to shop too.  There are over 2,000 emails on our mailing list - can you imagine if half of that list bought one piece every other month? 6 pieces a year from 1000 people would provide a salary for me and all 4 of these ladies.

Please pray for me to have discerning wisdom in where to advertise this fall, and please pray for orders so great that we simply have to hire 4 more artisans to keep up.  Pray for them each individually, because God knows them by name.  Thank you for storming Heaven on behalf of these 4 and our other 7 today.