If you sell handmade items, where do you store all your inventory? Unless you're running a completely made-to-order business, you're likely to have extra inventory for upcoming craft shows or the holiday season. Even small items like jewelry can take up a lot of room!
For jewelry-making supplies, I use a lot of traditional plastic boxes such as this one to store charms and this other one for steel jump rings. But one of the problems with storing finished goods like earrings is that they can get easily tangled or scratched if kept in boxes. If part of the reason you have inventory is to save time later, it doesn't help if you have to untangle or remake items too damaged to sell. Plus, it's hard for me to know exactly how many I have of something as I can't feasibly put each design in its own separate storage container. I do have finished items sorted by theme (travel) or type (bracelets), so my current inventory isn't complete chaos, just not as orderly as I'd have liked.
I've long been a fan of reusing storage items for new purposes. Back when I was selling cards, I wrote about how I used a shoe organizer to keep track of them. My fancy shoe boxes store items like postcards, business cards, and gift tags. I'm currently hanging a few engraved keychains from a coffee cup holder, the kind with hooks that slides onto a kitchen shelf. So it was a happy day recently when I figured out how to improve my earring and stitch marker inventory storage before holiday shopping started this year.
The Sewing Thread Holder
Back in 2011, I bought this large wooden sewing thread holder at a flea market for around five dollars, a great bargain considering new thread holders of a similar size sell new for around $40. I don't sew but I thought maybe the pegs could be useful to hang items like key chains at craft shows.
It has back legs so that it can stand in an A-shape. The wood is fairly light and I quickly realized that it was too big for the craft tables I used and it was much too low for easy browsing if I set it on the floor for stability. I thought about storing supply items on it, but it just wasn't convenient to have it open and on the bare cement floor in the basement where I worked. Even if I stored nothing breakable on the pegs, items would likely get dusty.
Because my initial ideas were not feasible, I stuck it in the basement for ten years! (Honestly, I didn't realize it had been down there that long. The downside of keeping a blog is that I have this horrifying fact in writing!) I couldn't bear to get rid of it because it seemed like it ought to be useful for something even if I couldn't figure out what that something was.
The Transformation
This month I finally realized that I could attach the holder to the wall as the back legs, after all, did fold flat. The space behind the closet door in my home office was perfect. The holder was just about the same width as the closet door, so with the door open, it was completely hidden. It was out of the way and less likely to be bumped accidentally.
The wood holder did already have two holes at the top, so it was fairly easy to hammer some nails into the wall and slide it on. However, the lower half of the holder wasn't completely flush to the wall due to the back legs and I worried that items might fall off.
My very smart handyman suggested that in addition to hanging the holder on two nails at the top that a larger nail be used through the middle wooden bar for added stability.
His second suggestion was to add a door stop, which ensures that the door cannot be fully open against the wall; it will always stop short. (If you go to the hardware store, this kind of door accessory is called a "hinge pin door stop" and costs around $2.) This is useful in case someone comes to the house who doesn't know about the thread holder and throws open that closet door. Everything hanging on it will stay put!
Most of my earrings fit well on this holder. I have a few longer earrings (2-3 inches) on the last row of pegs so they don't bump anything else below. It also works well for stitch markers and mini keychains. I'm still figuring out how to best organize everything, but so far it's working like a charm!