A couple of weeks ago I dropped off some of my handmade jewelry and ornaments for an annual artist sale in my hometown. I recognized the staff person who took my items, but she didn't recognize me. I participated in the sale last year, too, but I'm not a regular shop customer. There's really no reason she should know me. It didn't bother or surprise me in the least.
What did surprise me was when she opened up my box of items and immediately recognized them. These are different items than I sold last year, but the style—the funny or inspirational phrases, the quirky lettering style—was still the same. "Oh! It's you! We love your stuff!" She immediately launched into a monologue about the best place to display my work.
It's hard to describe how happy those few minutes made me. I've been in a bit of a design funk lately. I'm developing a new line and struggling to define my style. This brief encounter reminded me that sometimes it's hard to see your own work. You don't need to fill out lengthy questionnaires or take an 8-week course on how to find your style. You are already present in everything you make, even if it takes an outsider to point it out to you.
Where Nobody Knows Your Name
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Favorite Finds: The Best Pen in the World, Funny Essays, & Tiny Owls
On the podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, they always end with a segment called "What's Making Me Happy." The hosts share things from pop culture that other people might enjoy. It's inspired me to write this occasional feature on my blog.
Here are a few of my favorite things lately:
Jetstream Uni-Ball Pens
I am very particular about my pens. I bought these on the basis of a blog post titled "The Best Pen." I ordered a set from Amazon. They're a little bit too much like a ballpoint pen for my taste, but they don't smear like the gel pens I prefer. (Also, they're blue on the outside even though they have black ink inside, which just messes me up.) For my shop, I write notes on gift enclosure cards if the package is a gift and it's always annoying when I mess one up and have to start over. The real pleasure for me was finding that there are people so devoted to pens that they write entire blogs about them!
Meet Me at The Emotional Baggage Claim by Lisa Scottoline and Francesca Seritella
This book features essays from a mother-and-daughter team. You might recognize the mother's name. She's a New York Times bestselling mystery writer. The essays on mother-daughter relationships, dating, dogs, moving, and other topics are light and funny. If you're a jewelry designer, you might appreciate the one titled "Girl with the Pearl Earring" which is about the contents of Lisa's jewelry box. The best thing about this book is realizing that there are four other books in the series, so there's more to go back and enjoy.
Tiny Owl Charms
These owls were smaller than I expected (12x4mm). They have so much detail, which is unusual in a charm this small. I bought them from MK Beads, which often carries beading supplies that I don't see everywhere else. I had fun layering them with some hand stamped and hammered discs.
Revampt Goods
I took a Friday off and visited Revampt in Denver, Colorado. This store is full of all sorts of creatively repurposed items: jewelry made from tin cans, clocks made from bicycle chain, tables made with reclaimed wood, chairs made from street signs. I just loved looking at all the handmade items.
Bulbs
This week I'm planting bulbs: a mix of yellow and white daffodils, orange tulips, and a mix of pink, white, and blue wood hyacinths (Spanish bluebells). This is my favorite kind of gardening. By spring, I'll have completely forgotten that I've done this and will be astonished when the flowers come up. It's like giving your future self a surprise gift!
What wonderful things have you discovered lately?
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DIY Leather and Skull Necklace for Halloween
I confess I'm not a skull jewelry person; I'm more the happy flower-and-bird type. At the same time, I'm always up for a challenge. So when I received several strands of antiqued-looking skull beads from Halcraft USA, I challenged myself to use as many as I could.
How to Make This Midnight Ranch Necklace
I strung the skull beads on several different shades of brown cord and knotted in between each bead. I attached those beaded strands to three strands of soft leather lace using foldover cord ends and jump rings. (I love foldover cord ends—one of the easiest findings to use for flat cord or ribbon.) I added a lobster clasp to one side of the necklace. Full step-by-step instructions are on the Halcraft USA website.
The Story Behind The Name
Naming projects can be difficult. Occasionally, as with this necklace, a name pops into my head before I've even finished the project. With Midnight Ranch, I started telling myself a story as I knotted:
Where would you find so many old-looking skulls jumbled together like this? Maybe the leather is a clue: it would be somewhere out west, a desolate area far from civilization. It would be dark with the only light coming from the moon.
I pictured a woman on horseback galloping across the open plains. She stops at a bluff and looks down. Skulls are scattered on the rocks below . . .
What happens next? I suppose I'll need to write that story and find out!
Halloween Effects for Photos ...
I love playing around with my jewelry photos. (I didn't make this one shown at left, but I wish I did.)
If you go to Pic Monkey (a free graphics program), they have some cool spooky effects that you can use on your photos. You can add gashes or zombie eyes to your face or you can make your Halloween jewelry look like it perfectly matches the season. They even have fun fonts with names like "Face Your Fears" and "Nightbird."
... and a Pet Photo Contest
This has nothing to do with jewelry, except that many jewelry folks I know have an extended pet family.
PicMonkey is sponsoring a FrankenPet Halloween Contest. Create a Halloween-style photo of your pet and win one of several prizes, including a really cool video/photo camera. Entries are due on Halloween.
Have fun!
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Should You List Every Day on Etsy?
If you're looking for a quick answer to this question, here it is: maybe.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, for the month of August, I challenged myself to list five items (either renew expired or sold out items or list new ones) a day. It's now October and I'm sharing my results.
The Numbers ... and Success!
In August, I listed 24 new items, renewed 46 expired items, and renewed 53 sold out items. I also had 56 items auto-renewed; those were items that had multiple quantities, so if one sold, another would automatically relist without me doing anything. That's 179 total items, more than the 155 that was my goal.
As you may know, Etsy charges 20 cents per item to list, so for you number crunchers, this experiment cost me $35.80 to run.
I didn't do anything differently (other than list
consistently) than I normally do. I didn't do any advertising or
promotion through Etsy teams or paid ads. I didn't blast Facebook or
Twitter with my new listings. I didn't launch any new product lines
that were significantly different than what I normally sell. I just
listed and listed and listed.
I had 31% more orders this August than last August and my gross dollar amount was up 58%. So it worked, right?
Wait ... Not So Fast!
Here are some of the reasons it's hard to make a firm conclusion about the necessity of listing every day on Etsy:
- Etsy experiments heavily with their website layout and functionality. It's possible that one or more of their changes influenced the results. I'll never know for sure since they keep those experiments heavily guarded.
- I had one item go crazy with views when someone posted it on Instagram during the month of August. It was a sold out item, but it's possible that it brought in traffic that resulted in more sales of other items. That's the kind of variable that is impossible to control.
- It would make a stronger case if I had some data on months with no listing activity at all for comparison, but I'm not willing to do that at this point.
- I looked at my numbers for July and September, the months before and after my experiment. For both those months, it was "business as usual" which meant that I renewed and relisted on a random basis. Here's what I found:
- In July, the number of sales were up 44% and the gross dollar amount was up 34% over last July.
- In September, the number of sales went down 3% but the gross dollar amount was up 48% over last September.
- In July and September, I listed fewer items than I did in August.
- By just looking at the number of sales, August (the experimental month) was my biggest month of the three, but I actually earned more money in September.
What I Learned
I'm still glad I did this experiment, even if the results were inconclusive. Here's what I learned:
- Give yourself a daily quota. Five items was definitely ambitious. Some days it was very hard to get to that number. Five is not a sustainable number for me (especially with the deadlines for the two books I'm editing), but it did prove to me that posting one or two items a day is doable. Having a firm quota to meet can be helpful. Sometimes with an online shop you feel like you are never finished working on it. A listing quota gave me a way to focus without being overwhelmed.
- Make yourself accountable. You helped me meet my quota on difficult days. Yes, you! Even if you're a reader who never comments, I still thought about how I would let you down if I didn't meet my goal for a very good reason. (Just saying that I felt lazy wouldn't cut it!) If you want to try a similar experiment, I'd recommend that you tell as many people as possible.
- Change up your routine if needed. Normally I use the "draft" listing mode on Etsy quite heavily. I like to do a bunch of tagging all at once or work on photos for several listings. I rarely work on a single listing from start to finish at one go, but I did it a few times in August in order to meet my quota. I'm not sure if it was better or worse for me, but it was different.
- Results are not instant. The first three days that I tried this experiment I had no sales at all. This made me feel a little panicked and I almost gave up the experiment. It was a good reminder that you can't expect instant results when you make a change.
- Newness doesn't matter. The number of sales (or lack of sales) didn't seem to relate to whether I was listing a completely new item or whether I was renewing something that had sold out or expired. (I never renewed items that were currently active, by the way.) There seemed to be no correlation between the two that I could find.
- More listings, more sales? My highest sales days (between 8-9 sales a day) were on days when I had listed between 6-11 items that day (more than my normal quota). That's interesting, but maybe not conclusive. There were other days that I listed 6 items where I had one sale. Still, it makes me wonder what might happen if I tried upping my listing count. If I listed ten items a day instead of five, would my results be significantly different?
- Track patterns. One of the most important things I got from this experiment was just writing down the number of sales on my paper calendar every day. Looking at it, I can see that there are definitely trends to more sales on certain days of the week and fewer on other days. I'm sure if I mapped out several months, I'd also see patterns for sales occurring at certain times of the month.
I'd love to hear what you've discovered about listing on Etsy. Do you do it every day? Why or why not?
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Sneak Peek: My First Jewelry Making Video
A few weeks ago, the editorial director at Interweave asked me to make a video for my book, Unexpected Findings. I agreed, but honestly, I was a little nervous about it. I've never made any videos before, let alone one in a professional studio with three cameras watching my every move.
With less than a week to prepare, I chose three projects from the book to show and figured out the specific tips and stories to share about each one. (You won't learn how to make a complete jewelry project step-by-step in my video, but you will get some specific how-to ideas.) The finished video's not perfect, but I'm glad I decided to do it. I learned so much from the video staff who were very calm and experienced. But the biggest lesson for me was a reminder that it's good to be brave and say yes to new experiences; you never know how they will turn out!
This 5-minute video will be shared on Jewelry Making Daily next week (along with my guest blog post), but I wanted to give my blog readers an advance look. Thanks for watching!
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Friday, October 10, 2014 | by Michelle Mach | beads, book reviews, inspiration, jewelry, tools & materials, tutorial