It’s been another busy month for our family. I have always wondered how to launch a new product—we are learning a lot. The amount of time and effort that goes into the process is incredible. A lot of traveling to meet our customers and vendors. We presented the Tassi to the beauty industry this month in two tradeshows—one in Las Vegas and the other in Long Beach, California. It was fun to meet our customers face to face. We always show our DVD on a big screen TV at the tradeshows, and it is so fun to see the reaction of women—to see their faces light up when they “get it”. It is fun to hear all of the things women do keep their hair “outta” their face—headbands, ponytails, clips, clips, & more clips.

Left: Here I am with my husband, Paul, at the ISSE Tradeshow in Long Beach, California, in February 2008.

This is such an exciting time for me. Launching the Tassi has truly been a dream come true. And doing a blog?! All of this stuff is so new to me—but it will be fun for to be able to talk with you in person.

Our story is really 40 years in the making. It began with a hairwrap my Aunt Dot used to make for her daughters and me. I used mine every time I washed my face for many years until it wore out. One day when I was using a headband and a ponytail holder to keep my hair back while I washed my face, I thought about that hairwrap. I made a new one and that was the start of the modern Tassi.

I had a dream to take it to market because I knew that women everywhere needed this product. I talked to Aunt Dot about getting a patent and she was thrilled! I knew we had to have patent because it was such a simple idea. It took years of work and just when we were ready to give up we received a letter that the patent had been approved.

I began selling them to my friends and family and they became addicted to their Tassies. Word began to spread as they bought Tassies to give as gifts. It was so much fun to hear how it solved their hair problems.

While raising five children, I didn’t have time to do anything with the Tassi. Plus, I just didn’t know what to do. But every night when I washed my face, I knew I had to do something.

Fast forward to 2007 when we attended our first trade show for the professional beauty industry. Tassi was a runaway hit!

Right: Here we are at our first trade show, Cosmoprof North America in Las Vegas in July 2007. We had no idea what we were doing. From left to right — Paul (my husband), me, Sarah (my daughter), Chase (my son), Danny (my son)

Since then, our last few months have been very busy—finding a place to manufacture Tassies, working with marketing, developing our website, finding distribution partners, creating packaging, learning how everything works and even choosing colors!

Left: Here is the first shipment of mass produced Tassies arriving at our home in Arizona. They went straight into our garage, which became the Tassi warehouse. These days the cars are back in the garage, and the Tassies are in a real storage facility.

It’s exciting to think that now there are actually thousands of women and girls around the world using their Tassies every night.

Please let me know why you love the Tassi and how you use it. I’ll keep you posted here on my blog. Thank you for sharing your enthusiasm with me and for all of your kind words. It truly helps me a lot!

The question I am often asked is where did you get the name Tassi? We actually spent a long time trying to come up with just the right name—it seemed like every name we thought of was taken. Finally we just kind of made up a name—we had heard Tassi as a first name, last name and, of course, pecan tassies. Later, we learned that a form of the word Tassi in old or middle French means “little pocket or little pouch.” IT WAS PERFECT!

Thanks to Pete Jones of See Monster Design for the great logo!

We are going to be on QVC. This will be a great way to get the word out quickly about Tassi to a large number of women. One of the biggest challenges is to help women understand what the Tassi is and how it works. Being on QVC will give me a chance to demonstrate and explain the Tassi on TV for 8 minutes. I know that word of mouth is our best marketing tool. So the sooner we can get Tassies into the hands of women the better.

QVC required special tags and labeling and wanted the Tassies in their Virginia warehouse in three weeks. This gave us a couple weeks to get the work done before they needed to be shipped.

After doing some checking, we figured a fulfillment company would charge $8,000 – $10,000 to do the work. So we decided to do it ourselves.

This meant we had to bring the Tassi master cartons into our kitchen from the garage (we were still storing them in the garage at that time), cut them open, remove the four inner cartons (which takes a lot of shaking), cut open the inner cartons, empty them on the table, open each Tassi package, attach special tags, reseal the package, put two Tassies in a polybag, seal the bag, put on QVC bar codes, put the bags in inner cartons, put a sticker on the inner carton, put four inner cartons in a master carton and then attach QVC labels to each master carton. And we had to do this for thousands of Tassies.

We spread the word to friends and neighbors we thought would be willing to help and wouldn’t mind making a little extra money for Christmas.

We started on a Friday. I worked with three or four other people in my kitchen for five hours. We finished 450 Tassies. At that rate, it would take another 80 hours to finish all of the Tassies with five or six people working on them. I was feeling overwhelmed. Because of other commitments, including going back to QVC for a required training course, it seemed like an impossible task.

The next day (Saturday), we started at 7 a.m. with a small crew, but our numbers grew as the day went on. At one point, we had 22 people working on the Tassies. They were amazing. We worked until midnight and finished 7,200 Tassies in one day. We really felt like it was a miracle. Needless to say, we were able to finish the work and send them to QVC on time.

Left: Here is a picture of our Tassi crew at work in my kitchen on that long Saturday.

Thank you for visiting the new Tassi website.

Watch this space because I’ll be posting my blog entries very soon.

Here’s just some the great new features on our website…

• Tassi Talk: See for yourself how the Tassi has helped others and share your own happy stories
• Tell A Friend: Let your friends know that you were just thinking of them…and their hair
• Tassi News: Catch us at upcoming events!
• Tale of the Tassi: Read how it all began

And there’s more. Please explore and enjoy.

Thanks for stopping by!

– Shawna