A Year in Review and 2025 New Year's Resolutions

It's officially 2025 and that means its time to reflect on the year gone by and set new goals for the future. 2024 was a rough one, but we've made massive strides as a business and we are so excited about our plans for this upcoming year.

2024: A Year of Firsts

2024 had a lot of firsts for our little business. It was our first time doing a bunch of markets in Connecticut, our first time launching a website, and the first time we concentrated on releasing regular holiday collections. We also created our custom dolls collection, an entirely different style of crochet that we hadn't attempted before. But we had a vision, and we made it happen.

Beyond the events and shop, we've also been working on expanding our crocheting skills. Of course, the dolls themselves involve new techniques, but also we've developed the doll clothes and even crocheted our first human-sized sweater! We finally learned surface crochet this year, experimented with glow-in-the-dark materials, worked on our embroidery skills, and even started making our own safety eyes. What I might be most proud of, however, is that we've begun to write our patterns! Before 2024, I'd made some small efforts at pattern writing, but mostly I just purchased patterns from other creators. This year, I wrote dozens of patterns, many of which were the doll clothes for our custom dolls! Considering we hadn't even made a single human-sized article of clothing (that wasn't a hat or scarf), jumping straight to the doll scale was challenging, and rewarding. Of course, we've also been writing patterns for plushies, especially this holiday season with our gingerbread man and Santa Claus. While we haven't released all the patterns we've written, we did manage to release six new patterns on our ribblr including our acorn renn-faire pouch which was this years best seller!

From a number's point of view, we made around $4,000 this year in sales at our various markets. Unfortunately, due to the fact that this year included a lot of start up fees for our booth tent and the website, we didn't really turn a profit, but we also didn't run red. Most of the purchases were one time only ones, so this year we will hopefully see better margins!

Of course, money isn't everything. One of the aspects of owning Candy Cap that we find to be incredibly rewarding is the creation of our own little community! We now have 252 followers on our Instagram, our best performing reel hit 1,690 views, and our Ribblr has 111 followers! We could not have had the success we did this year without all of you, and are so incredibly grateful for the support.

But enough about the past. It's time to set some new year's resolutions, goals, and drop some sneaky sneak peaks at our upcoming projects!

New Year? New Year's Resolutions!

Now, I know there's that whole stereotype about New Year's Resolutions being over by March at the latest. And I will readily admit to that. The number of new planners on our shelf that have maybe one or two months filled out can attest to a lack of upkeep on resolutions. But these aren't resolutions like "work out more." These are very special small business owner new year's resolutions! It's different, trust me.

Our first resolution is to get consistent with our marketing. We've got pretty strong branding, but boy are we bad at social media. It's never been a strong suit, especially when we spend most of our crochet time on the couch in PJs squinting because we decided to use black yarn when we only have fairy lights to illuminate things. Not exactly photogenic. But our goal this year is to improve our social media game with a consistent posting schedule and plan, a consistent look amongst our social media posts, and, hopefully, more consistent blog posts as well, though if I only have energy for one post, it'll be on Instagram or YouTube, not here.

Oh did I mention YouTube? Well that's new year's resolution number 2. We are starting a YouTube Channel! I can't release any more details yet as we are still working on planning things, but yes, our goal is to have the first video released by the end of January, if all things continue as planned.

Last but certainly not least, we are planning some controlled expansion. I say controlled because Candy Cap is run by one person, and I have health issues that limit my abilities, on top of a day job and grad school, so I can't go as big as I'd like. But we are aiming to grow nonetheless! We are planning six markets this year instead of the four we did in 2024, we've got a few exciting new products in development, we want to continue with our quarterly seasonal collections while also adding exclusive outfits to our custom dolls for each holiday, and our goal is to crack 1,000 instagram followers by 2026! It's a lot, and it'll take a lot of work to grow, but I have every confidence that we can succeed.

What are your new year's resolutions? What are your thoughts about ours? Is there anything you want to see us do in 2025? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! And a very happy 2025 to everyone!