When Customers Like our JustZen Items too much

Today we heard back from Jan after many years…

She really needed some new hoodies and we agreed when we saw the pictures she sent of her old ones that she had worn down to threads.

Hey Merlin and Gigi:

Just bought two new hoodies, one for me and one for my sister. We bought our original hoodies years ago from Gigi at the Tempe Festival of the Arts in AZ. Your garments are great quality and wearable art. We’ve worn them to threads.

We’ve bought other items over the years and love them all. I also bought a thermal shirt today.

Peace and best wishes,
Jan

I just hope nobody sees that as bad advertisement for JustZen  🙂

A Few More Shirts

Meeting Interesting People at the Fair

One of the ways to get the word out about the wearable art of the label JustZen, is to go out and meet people who do like unusual things. What better venue than art and craft show!

One of the perks of the visits to these shows is that you can meet many other interesting people that like to create things that are out of the ordinary – the vendors and artist.

If you are familiar with JustZen, you know that Gigi is off to shows all over the South-West, and even up into Idaho. After many shows you will more and more recognize familiar faces and even build friendships. The world of the traveling artists is a little universe of its own.

Obviously, trading wares and art is a common occurrence. Who would be better suited to appreciate unusual art than another artist who produces extraordinary art.

Paul is one of those contacts Gigi built. He is a potter who likes tie dye – and Gigi is a tie-dyer who likes pottery – a match made in heaven!

Today Gigi cooked spaghetti and we used our new bowls from Paul. We just had to take a photo and send it to Paul, telling him that the dish was twice as tasty because of the nice new bowls.

bowl

If you like unusual pottery, visit Paul’s Mystic Bottle Pottery Studio.

Color and Well-Being

A while back a customer wrote us and thanked us for our beautiful clothes and how it helped her ease hard times she had fallen onto.

That made us realize how important it can be how we look at the world and how we can change our mind by changing how we present ourselves to the world.

You know the old grouch and how he looks – grey, hunched and with contempt for everything around him burned into the lines of his face. If you sometimes feell like that, what can you do to dig yourself out of that hole?

Color in a grey world

Color in a grey world

First thing would be to lift up your head and straighen your shoulders, then a look into the mirror and picture what you would want to see to make you feel better – or even good!

Getting rid of that grey would definitely be helpful, right? Even if it might feel wrong initially to wear something happy when you feel down, it does help!

The principle at work here is ‘fake it until you make it.’ You have to take just a little step out of your feeling down and handle the situation – a tiny, little bit – from the outside.

You can, so to speak, bootstrap yourself out of any negativity and into a feeling of …. YEAH!!

Buying Lifestock on Behalf of JustZen’s Customers

Yes, you read that right – JustZen bought some livestock.

A Cow

A Goat

and some Chicks

How did this come about?

A few years ago JustZen started to offer free hairbands in exchange for a donation – any donation – towards a group of foster children JustZen supports around the world in developing countries. These donations were to fund some extra boost for the holidays.

This was such a successful action that it became permanent. Now, any donation wins the donor an entry to a raffle for a free mudmee tie-dye. The drawing for the free item happens when the donations reach two hundred dollars.

Just in time for the holidays that happened again. But this time it was possible to actually decide that these extra donations would go and thinking this over, what would do the greatest good, it was decided that it’s a cow for milk, a goat for the other kind of milk and chicks to grow up and lay eggs.

Thus – JustZen bought livestock on behalf of their customers.

The drawing for the free item will happen in a few day and the cycle will start over – and we will see how fast the $200-goal can be reached now.

 

It’s time to dress a bit warmer

In anticipation of some cooler (ice and snow) weather, we at JustZen have now added quite a few long sleeve thermal and henley shirts. We announced those to our mailing list with the following messages:

14+9 New Henley Shirts

Hi ,
Wishing that ya’ll have a great weekend! – it’s Merlin from JustZen with a few new henley shirts.
Throughout the year our Henley Shirts have been your favorite, so we never let our inventory run too low, but different sizes fly off the shelves at different rates so I have added 14 new ones in size M and 9 in size L.
Now you get a little bit of an insight into our high-tech inner workings – when Gigi selects the items that need to go on the web site, these items get their number and then she photographs them.
I then get a list like this (see, not only the items are hand-made, also our paperwork is)…

together with all the photos and post them all on the web site after cropping and shrinking them. If you click on this list above you can see all the new items I just added.
One of the new shirts is this one that I personally like alot.

Hope you like ’em – the one I showed you here is item 2476 (size M) but if you want to see all our henleys you can click here.
Cheers,
Merlin

PS Obviously these henley shirts are not the only thing we have – in case you missed my last mails – two week or so ago – we also added a whole new type of item – the V-Neck T-shirt, and last week I added a whole bunch of thermal shirts.
PPS: if you want to see Gigi this weekend and check out out items in the real world, you have to go to Arizona, she is at “The Fountain Festival” in Fountain Hills, AZ and has booth A82.

And then the next weeks we said:

More New Henley Shirts –
this time S, XL and XXL

Hi,

Hope you did not think we would only have new henleys in M and L!

When I sent out my email yesterday I just did not manage to get them all out – I just needed another day – I got that – and here are the rest of the sizes of all those Henley Shirts.

Let me just show you what I added to the web site today – each of the pictures is clickable and brings you right to the item (there is a chance that it shows as SOLD – then somebody beat you to it.

Henley shirts in size S:

Henley shirts in size XL:

Henley shirts in size XXL:

Cheers,
Merlin

PS As I was working on those henleys, I also added a few classic tanks in XL, and some of those cute flared tanks in size L with a side pocket.

Finally some new classic tanks – and some buddha bags

The following is a reprint of the message that JustZen sent out to all it’s great customers:

Greetings – Merlin here with news about some items we added to the JustZen Web site.

Some of you have been nearly angry with us that we had only two lonely classic tanks left on our web site. I now hope that this discontent with us will dissipate quickly as we finally got some more of these classic tanks ready and I – yours truly – have added them to the web site for you to peruse.
Here are two of those that I added…

If you like on of them above you can click on them to find them directly on the web site, but you can also see them all.

Our Buddha Bags are always flying out the door, particularly after they were featured in Women’s Health Magazine as an “Essential Item” – and so we added a few more to offer a bigger variety of colors and patterns. Here are two of them…


Click on picture to go directly to this bag


Click on picture to go directly to this bag

As usual, we have only one bag exactly as the one shown above, so depending on the time you go and take a look, it might be gone already – but there are many other nice ones  🙂

Hope you like ’em.
Cheers,
Merlin

PS: …and don’t forget to check out our next generation of smock dresses – I know, it’s pretty late in the year for those, but the summer is still with us, so let’s use those beautiful days to the fullest…