Welcome Fabric Fans!

In my March 28th blog post, I talked all about my next big trip to North and South Carolina. This is the big week of the trip and I am psyched. What I am most psyched about is going to Oxford Cutting & Shipping and here’s why. If you recall, Oxford Cutting & Shipping is the facility we acquired in order to have somewhere to have our precuts produced. Formerly, this was owned by another gentleman, but he retired so we really had no choice, but to acquire the business to not disrupt our business. So far so good over there. It’s also opening up a lot of new opportunities…

One of the things that is so amazing about fabric is that the possibilities of what you can make with them are absolutely endless. For that reason, it is so awesome to be able to admire as many creations as possible. There is nothing that makes me happier than to see what people make with the fabric that I have had the pleasure of watching be developed from inception to production to your final project. For this reason, I love that so many people email me at scott@jaftex.com to share their awesome creations. Right now, most of the project photos being shared are from people that won a prize from…

In the summer of 2020, I moved from New York to Connecticut. At that same time, my social media team and I determined that I needed to bring my @jaftexpresident video game up to the next level. As such, we determined that it was time to put out an ad for me to get my very own local videographer. The plan was for the videographer to come to my house on a regular basis to create more video content than I was creating before when I didn’t have a videographer. A pretty simple concept. My team got the resumes together and interviewed candidates until they got it down to 2…

As I am sure you know already, I am a huge fan of creating lots of videos for my business, but also, I like to encourage my customers to do the same for the benefit of their business. This all started after attending the Social Media Examiner Conference, about 5 years back, where I heard one of the guest speakers say that “80 percent of what we consume on social media will be video.” You have definitely heard me say this before and I like to practice what I preach and still do. Since attending the conference, my video game has definitely been stepped up a few levels, if I…

I must say that Covid really threw a wrench into me awarding prizes to the winners of the Jaftex Shop Tour Video Challenge over the last couple of years. If you recall, every August, I host a challenge for retailers to create a Facebook Live video tour of their shops. My team then takes those videos and posts them on my @jaftexpresident Facebook page. The idea is to give the retailers as much exposure as possible for their shops by bribing….I mean encouraging them to make videos. In the end, everyone is a winner, but the true winner is the shop that receives the most views of their video. The…

Today’s blog was to be another one on how we at Jaftex have embraced social media to help improve our business. However, something more timely came up so I am going to blog about that instead. I will reconvene the social media posts in the coming weeks. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I wanted to invite you all to a special Facebook Live Fireside Chat that I am hosting on Friday, March 25th at 5:30 PM Eastern time. Let me say that it will be a real fireside chat as I will of course have a fire going. Hopefully, it won’t be 60 degrees out as that might not go…

As mentioned in last week’s blog, for the next few weeks I will be talking about how we at Jaftex have embraced social media and how it has benefited our companies. In particular, today I am going to talk about our implementation and use of Facebook groups. I find that it sometimes takes a little time for our team to embrace new tools on social media. For example, when Facebook came out with groups, it took us a little bit to realize the value before we decided to pounce. When we decided that all was clear, the first group we started with was the Jaftex Retailers Group. As I have…

In 2018 & 2019, I attended the Social Media Marketing Examiner Conference in San Diego, CA with some of my marketing team. This was certainly an eye-opening event and a game-changer for myself and my brands. After the event, I came home with two new overarching concepts for my team to focus on. These broad guiding concepts have served us well thus far. One thing I learned at the conference was that 80% of what would be consumed on social media would be video. As such, and as you know, we have been pushing video hard both within our company and encouraging our customers to do the same. The other…

Since Covid started, one casualty that the quilting industry faced was that several Quilt Markets were canceled. For fabric resellers a.k.a. my customers, a huge negative about not having Quilt Market was that they were missing out on the education that they would normally attain through the Schoolhouse series portion of Quilt Market. For those that are not familiar with Schoolhouse, that includes a day or two series of educational classes that take place before the Quilt Market begins. The classes are offered by vendors like the Jaftex Companies, people we sponsor, designers, quilters, authors and so many others. In an effort to keep the education going and fill the…

A couple of years back, one of my sales reps reached out to me to let me know that Timna Tarr would be speaking at Gotham Quilts in New York City right across the street from my office. She told me, “You have to meet Timna because she is so talented.” She went on to urge me to get Timna to agree to design for Jaftex. I was trying to work it out so I could attend the class Timna was teaching, but I had too many conflicts. I did however still want to meet Timna. As such, I invited her to come visit me in the city to have…