It’s official. Our website is live. And… heck yes, its’ been a long time coming.

So WTF? Good question.

In this day in age, it’s a no brainer - you need a website. Especially when you don’t have a brick & morder location. It’s beyond a no brainer. Without one… it’s a non-starter. So I ask again… WTF?

I have a couple of answers. One, we were busy. And two… it’s complicated.

In the summer of 2010, we started selling handcrafted leather accessories on Etsy.com. Now a household name (I’ve heard whispers of them going public), believe it or not back then… it wasn’t. I guess you could say we were relatively early adopters of the sales platform. Funny enough, we also had a website at the time (Google hard & deep enough and I’m sure you’ll stumble upon some embarrassing remnants). It was awful with a capital A. It was built by yours truly (Josh), the content was predominantly “Hipstamatic” aided photos (remember “Hipstamatic”?), and ‘cause we were making a lot of one-of-a-kind products at the time, it was dated pretty much instantly. We scrapped the site and our Etsy shop became our online “face” ‘cause it was user friendly, easy to update, and was (kinda sorta) “driving traffic”. It was supposed to be a temporary stopgap solution.

Fast forward to the fall of 2013. Still no website. Our Etsy shop was generating enough sales to pay the rent (just), and our priority at the time was to launch a Kickstarter.com campaign (www.kickstarter.com/projects/lovejulesleather/in-search-of-a-sole-the-love-jules-leather-shoe-co). I’ll leave that whole bag of worms for another day, but long story short, the campaign was extremely (and unexpectedly) successful, things got extremely busy, we got extremely backlogged, and again the launching of our website got backburned while we ran around like chickens with our heads cut-off trying to play catchup.

And, a year and a half later… here we are.

I can tell you the fact we’re at this place at all, has less to do with us, and more to do with the fact we have some amazingly supportive friends (http://lovejulesleather.myshopify.com/pages/about-us). Launching a website is easy. If we were okay with any old website, I’m sure we would have found the time to get’er done long ago. But we weren’t, so it’s taken us our entire existence to launch something we felt told the story of what we’re doing offline… well. ‘Cause if it ain’t worth doin’ well...

So Lovejulesleather.com is now a thing. It’s been a long time coming, heck yes. But you know… I’m okay with it.