End of year shop review

 Blogging Business Artisans, Boomers and Beyond Etsy Street Team (BBEST), Selling Handmade
Dec 312012
 

November marked my fifth year of selling on Etsy, a journey that began with a shop called JN Originals that features crocheted and felted personal accessories, continued with papercrafted items in Mister PenQuin, and extended with recycled craft supplies in 2nd Chance Treasures. Along the way I’ve learned lessons about marketing, photography, shipping and customer service. My journey has been made easier by becoming a member of multiple selling teams on Etsy, most particularly BBEST (Boomers and Beyond Etsy Street Team) and Blogging Business Artisans. In fact, one of the strongest pieces of advice I would give a newcomer to the Etsy scene is to join a team that reflects your interests, as this will shorten your learning curve. Visit the information-packed Etsy post, What is Teams? to learn more. I also recommend becoming familiar with the Etsy Seller’s Handbook. Finally, you can pick up lots of marketing and organizational tips by visiting such sites as Blacksburg Belle, written by April Bowles-Olin, and Handmadeology, written by a team of entrepreneurs.

One of the pieces of online selling advice that really caught my attention this past year is the concept of having a cohesive shop. In her post, How to Create a Cohesive Shop, Etsy staffer Michelle writes, “Creating a cohesive shop is the most important tool for branding yourself, and one of your biggest allies in your search for repeat customers. Customers who love your style will share your shop with others and come back again and again.”

Define your style

What is a cohesive shop? According to Michelle, a cohesive shop has a clearly defined style that can be summed up in just a few words. This makes it easy for both you and others to promote your shop through blogging, simply because it is easy to identify your style and describe it. Your shop may also be more visible if you have a well defined style because search results may better match what you sell than if your shop is a mixture of unrelated items that share no common theme other than that they are handmade by you.

For the first shop on Etsy that I opened, JN Originals, my style has evolved over time. In fact, when I first began selling on Etsy, I was like a lot of other sellers who are not exactly sure what they intend to sell. I remember starting off with felted wool coasters, crocheted hair scrunchies, and long, fuzzy scarves, none of which I make anymore. I added crocheted spa cloths and felted java jackets, felted needle books, felted wool clutch purses—and eventually, crocheted wearables such as flower brooches, scarflettes, headwarmers, hats and fingerless gloves. What I observed is that while all of these products share a common material—yarn—the ones that sell best for me are the wearables, particularly the ones that feature a flower as part of their design. Moreover, they are customizeable, which is a selling point. This, then, has become the style that defines my shop: crocheted wearable accessories featuring a flower motif.

Cohesive Shop Collage

Match your products to your style

Michelle points out that once you define your style, it is important to make sure that your product line-up meshes with your definition. Gradually, over the course of this past year,  I have been redefining the sections in my shop to include only crocheted wearables. To be sure, there are still some products that don’t quite fit. These include my felted wool java jackets which, despite the fact that they sell, sell infrequently and inconsistently.

DSCN5383

I am still wrestling with the appropriate home for the felted wool needle books I make, not because they don’t sell, but because they no longer fit the style of JN Originals. Perhaps they will move into a fourth shop that has been sitting on the Etsy site, product-less, for more than a year. This shop is Dancing Thimble, intended for fabric accessories—what I like to call “fabric solutions.” I can visualize a section containing sewing tools at this selling venue.

As of December, I moved out the spa cloths and the last set of coasters from JN Originals. What will also move out during 2013 will be the long, fuzzy scarves that were popular some years back (and seem to still be worn by Midwestern women because of our very cold winters and the warmth of these scarves), but are perhaps not so popular elsewhere. Likely these same scarves will sell locally at craft fairs, rather than online.

Having a defined style helps you to develop new products, or to modify existing ones that will conform better to your style. For longer than I would like to admit, I have needed to pull my felted bags from my shop to modify them to include the floral motif that highlights other products. The bag with the felted flower below, for example, is one I made for myself but whose style has never appeared in JN Originals.

Margarete Bag in Turquoise with Floral Accents (front)

Recognize who your buyers are

Part of having a cohesive shop is knowing who your customers are, and making sure that every product you offer is geared toward those potential buyers. For the most part, I have come to recognize that women and teenage girls represent my buyers. But I also realize that my buyers include those who like to crochet the same items I make. So, I have begun to offer crochet patterns to address the needs of this type of customer. My first pattern is a set of fingerless gloves that fits an average-sized woman or teen. I expect that in 2013 I will roll out other patterns, not only on Etsy but also at the Craftsy site. In addition, I intend to broaden my market by including some unisex items.

Match your shop appearance to your style

Etsy’s Michelle, in her post about creating a cohesive shop, advises sellers to tailor their photographic backgrounds and banners to their style to create a cohesive shop. My product backgrounds, which are a plain white, will remain so in order to show off the colors and textures of my work. My shop banner, on the other hand, needs some work. It currently features a pink background with tiny flowers scattered on it (which ties in somewhat with the floral motif I use), but doesn’t really tell you what I sell. We’ll see what the new year brings!

Creating a cohesive shop takes time and experimentation. Sometimes it’s hard to let go of products you consider to be your favorites, but don’t sell particularly well. Likely these are items you can turn into special gifts. In the end, it’s all about your buyer!

I’d love to hear what other sellers are doing to make their shop more cohesive; let me know in your comments below.

© 2012 Judy Nolan. All rights reserved.

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Silent auction fundraiser being held for Laura Triem

 Boomers and Beyond Etsy Street Team (BBEST), Charitable Projects
Dec 312011
 

One of the things Etsy sellers do for each other is celebrate each other’s business and personal successes, but also commiserate with and support each other during times of difficulty. On one of the teams to which I belong, Boomers and Beyond Etsy Street Team (BBEST), fellow team member Judi Brandow shared with us the story of Laura Triem, her son’s girlfriend. In early November, this vivacious young lady, a college student studying forensic anthropology, was on her way to work. Distracted, she accidentally crossed in front of a light rail train, was struck and sustained serious injuries, including brain trauma. Although I do not know Laura personally, I was touched by her story, which you can read about HERE.

Friends and family members are pulling for Laura, holding a Silent Auction fundraiser on her behalf on February 4th, 2012. If you are interested in finding out how you can help, please contact Judi Brandow through her Etsy shop, Pickleberry Trifles.

You can follow Laura’s progress on Facebook at Supporting Laura Triem, or visit her Give Forward page, which family members and friends are using to help publicize her cause and raise funds for a Special Needs Trust to assist with the needs Laura may have after all her insurance coverage is exhausted.

As for myself, I am sending Judi a collection of M&M ornaments in the hope that she can use them for Looney Jars (jars filled with items that are available for smaller donations). In the next week, I will finish and ship off to Judi a handmade journal that can be auctioned off.

 

© 2011 Judy Nolan. All rights reserved.

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Breakfast on Saturday night

 Boomers and Beyond Etsy Street Team (BBEST), Buying Handmade, History Spotlight
Oct 212009
 

This past Saturday, as my husband and I prepared our evening meal, a “breakfast-like supper” consisting of fried eggs, bacon and toast, I began thinking about how common it is for our friends and family members to eat a morning meal at the end of the day. When I was growing up, my father peeled potatoes for crisp potato pancakes on Saturday nights, or he mixed a batch of batter and ladled it into our waffle iron. My husband reports that in his family, it was not unusual to have similar meals on weekend nights. In many family-style restaurants, in fact, breakfast or brunch (a combination of breakfast and lunch items served a la carte) is available all day, particularly on weekends. Is this an American custom? I’m really not sure. Ken Albala, in Food in Early Modern Europe, says that the word breakfast comes from the Latin word disjejunare, which means to un-fast. This word became disnare in the Romance languages, or disner in Olde French—eventually dinner in English. “Thus,” says Albala, “the word dinner actually means breakfast.”

I do know that dining traditions—and the times that people eat—differ according to geography, culture, occupation and economic conditions. An exchange student I knew in high school, for example, spent a year in Finland, where she learned to eat six meals a day. When my husband and I lived in southern California, it was commonplace for employers to hire a catering truck to bring in a mid-morning snack that consisted of sugary donuts and over-sized blueberry muffins, hot dogs and chili dogs, and almost anything you could heat in a tortilla: tacos, tamales, burritos,  enchiladas. Farmers and ranchers usually labor for hours outdoors, right after the sun rises, before they sit down to breakfast, and those on a tight budget often take advantage of what the land produces plentifully: grain-based foods.

In the United States, breakfast traditions have evolved over time. For example, early pioneers followed the lead of Native Americans who grew corn, cooking many corn-based products. These included breads prepared with various methods, such as corn pone pan-fried in oil, griddle-fried Johnnycakes, and ashcakes that were wrapped in cabbage leaves and cooked in the ashes of a campfire. Hoecakes were cooked on yes! the side of a hoe, and corn dodgers were mixed from cornmeal, water, buttermilk and baking powder. It is likely that today’s buttermilk pancakes and tortillas grew out of these early practices.

In addition to enjoying a broad range of corn-based breads, American settlers’ eating habits were heavily influenced by European dining traditions. Colonists of the late 1600s, for example, ate a simple continental breakfast of bread or porridge, accompanied by beer. By the early 1800s, the continental breakfast included a selection of breads and butter, cold meats, coffee and tea. During the Victorian Age (mid-1800s to 1900), Americans—particularly the middle class—had more income, so breakfasts became wide-ranging affairs with many different foods. These included hot cereal, fish, sausages, meat pies, breads with marmalade, butter and jam, bacon and eggs, fruit and vegetables—not too unlike an American brunch, but perhaps heavier in the meat department. Some typical menu items included broiled mackerel, poached eggs with asparagus tips, lamb chops, muffins, and cheese-and-crackers, served with beverages such as orange juice and coffee.

by HeronsTreasures

The breakfast cereals of the modern day were not common until the 19th century, when Victorians ate oatmeal. Unlike today’s instant oatmeal, however, they cooked it to death. They soaked the hulled oats overnight in water, then boiled it for four to twenty-four hours. Will Keith Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist, created Toasted Corn Flakes as the result of this tendency to cook oats so thoroughly. He accidentally cooked oats too long; when they dried, they became flakes. But decades before Kellogg’s Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company was founded, the Quaker Oats company registered its cereal as a trademark, and in 1875 began selling oats in boxes. “Quick oats” arrived in 1922, instant oatmeal in 1966, and flavored oatmeal by the 1970s, when many of the younger Boomers were in high school.

But what about the donuts and pastries that also characterize many American breakfasts? When German, Dutch, and Scandinavian immigrants came to the United States, they brought their coffee cake recipes with them. These original cakes were not the sugary concoctions with which most of us are familiar, but bread-like baked goods. Over time, however, they changed. In the kitchens of northern European immigrants, coffee cakes became donuts and pastries filled with sugared fruit, cheese, yogurt and other creamy fillings, accompanied by a cup of coffee and a bit of friendly chat known as a Kaffeeklatsch. According to Evan Jones in his book, American Food: The Gastronomic Story, “. . . . The term coffee klatch became part of the language, and its original meaning—a moment that combined gossip with coffee drinking—was changed to define the American version of England’s tea, a midmorning or midafternoon gathering at which to imbibe and ingest . . . .”

I’m still not sure how breakfast has evolved into an evening meal, but Regina Charboneau, who writes for the The Atlantic Food Channel, suggests that breakfasts for dinner “may have been borne of lean times, maybe after the Civil War or during the Great Depression.” She explains that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, many people from the Deep South were already accustomed to doing without because boll weevils had destroyed their cotton crops. To ease the economic burden this put on families, people stretched their budgets by preparing breakfast for dinner. Whether or not the same reasoning applies today, breakfast for dinner appears to be a common practice—and a tasty one.

For more information about breakfast history, visit the following Web sites:

© 2009 Judy Nolan. All rights reserved. Please note that the images in this post are owned by the artists and may not be used without permission. Simultaneously published at http://boomersandbeyond.blogspot.com.

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Once upon a bag

 Boomers and Beyond Etsy Street Team (BBEST), Buying Handmade, History Spotlight
Nov 262008
 

Handbags were originally nothing more than sacks made of leaves and animal hide. Egyptian hieroglyphics depict men, not women, wearing them about their waist to hold flint and money. Peasants wore fairly large bags that carried seed, while gentlemen’s bags carried pomanders to mask bad environmental (or human) smells. These sacks were actually pockets attached to the girdle with a cord. The risk, of course, was that a thief, known as a “cut purse,” would slash the string and steal the bag. By the Middle Ages, both men and women began wearing bags as a sign of affluence. Fashioned of the finest silks with tasseled strings, embroidery and jewel decorations, they represent the first designer bags. These early designer bags continued to be fastened to the outside of garments, but the really wealthy hired servants to carry their bags for them.

Eventually, however, women started wearing bags beneath their dresses, and men ceased wearing them altogether because inside garment pockets were developed for their trousers. As fashions changed and women’s skirts clung more closely to their bodies (especially during the Regency period), it became impractical to wear a bulky bag beneath the fabric. In the 1800s the first real handbags–purses intended to be carried by the hand–emerged. These were practical purses, or reticules, that carried perfume, smelling salts, a fan and visiting cards.

It is interesting to note that 100 years later, men and women once more were using handbags, but men’s handbags were actually luggage bags that looked like today’s briefcases, and women’s handbags were feminine versions of the same bag, with compartments for women’s accessories. These bags were made from metal and leather until World War II, when a shortage of these materials led instead to the use of wood and plastic in handbags, and eventually to many other types of materials. Today’s handbags are made of all of these materials, but also include many types of fabric from rough burlap to the finest silks and velvets, synthetics, natural and manmade fibers, and faux animal skins. Nearly all bags are suited to specific occasions. There are designer bags that match a formal event such as a gala or a wedding, power bags for the business woman (or man), tote bags for the shopper or yarn enthusiast, book bags for the student, and so on.

In some ways, handbags have come full circle. The bags worn once exclusively around the waist have become today’s fanny packs, shoulder bags and backpacks, and are worn by men and women alike. Some bags are for show, others are used on the go, and multi-functional ones go “with the flow.” Illustrating this diversity are BBEST team members’ bags. Janine of TalkingDog, for example, has designed this Hand Painted Silk Drawstring Bag that can be carried to formal events or tied to a casual jeans pocket.

This gorgeous Tina Brown and Blue Batik Quilted and Beaded Bag by Kym of kimbuktu is both a shoulder bag and a backpack.

HomeMadeOriginals has repurposed part of a striped wool sweater to fashion this Wristlet bag, perfect for your cell phone, keys and credit cards.

This crocheted Teal Hobo Bag by Pam of bagsandmorebypam is the ideal tote for the market, the beach, school, the plane, or shopping at the mall.

Dayna of scottieacres designed her Helpful Hannah Tote in Embroidered Denim “to go anywhere but be stylish as well.” The roomy tote holds just about anything, but also features a tiny inside pocket for keys, wallet or an electronic device.

This Bling Bling Black Evening Bag by NoDuplicates is probably not too different from the reticules carried by noblemen and their ladies during the Middle Ages.

Finally, this Bag with Heart Wet-Felted Blue Purse by Chrissie of makeyourpresentsfelt is a perfect example of a casual purse for daily essentials, intended to be carried by hand.

To learn more interesting facts about the history of the handbag, you may wish to refer to the following resources:

© 2008 Judy Nolan. All rights reserved. Please note that the images in this post are owned by the artists and may not be used without permission. Simultaneously published at http://boomersandbeyond.blogspot.com.

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Shopping from your keyboard

 Boomers and Beyond Etsy Street Team (BBEST), Buying Handmade
Nov 132008
 

Here’s a special opportunity for all of you online shoppers who want to save gas and shop from your keyboard instead. Check out It’s a Wonderful Sale this holiday season when you shop the BBEST Limited Time Sale and find handmade and vintage treasures for everyone on your list, quickly, easily, and at remarkable values. So pull up a chair, get comfy and find the joy that the BBEST (Boomers and Beyond Etsy Street Team) has to offer! BBEST artists are talented individuals who sell their products in the homemade goods marketplace known as Etsy.com.

Here’s how this special event works. First, if you have not yet registered as an Etsy visitor, go to http://www.etsy.com, and click on Register. Now you’re ready to begin!

Check out the BBEST HoLiDaY HuNt for registered Etsy buyers. THREE WONDERFUL PRIZE PACKAGES will be given away.

These BBEST Team members have generously donated the fabulous holiday gift item collections seen in the above photo.

TWO ways to enter. NO PURCHASE REQUIRED.

RULES:

Play this way . . . Holiday Hide & Seek:

Simply hunt through the shops below and look for the BBEST avatar seen to the right. It is randomly placed in one listing item photo slot in some of our shops.

Find the avatar. Copy the listing ID of each item. When you’ve found 10, convo (contact) the BBEST shop with that list, AND come to the sale discussion on Etsy (click on link to get there) and post that you’ve done so. Do not reveal any hidden avatar locations to any eligible players. Your name will be entered into our random prize drawing! Limit: one entry per Etsian.

EXEMPT from this method of entry are those team members who have a hidden avatar in their shops. EXEMPT from both methods of entry are joonbeam, chauncey and sixsisters, who are the team leaders and organizers of this sale and game.

Play this way . . . Support Handmade.

Save money. For every $1 you spend in our participating shops, listed below, your name will be entered into the random prize drawing. All three prize packages will be given away.

  • You must enter BBEST in the notes to seller upon checkout.
  • Only complete dollar amounts (i.e., $7.65 = 7 entries) from each shop count. No amounts less than $1 will be combined between or among multiple shop purchases.
  • The final sale price dollar amounts coincide with your entries. In other words, regardless of when the discounted price is finalized, the discounted total dollars determine the number of entries. (For example, some sale transactions are handled via convo / reserved listing with the sale price, others purchase and get a revised invoice.) If a shop has a mix of sale (reduced price) items and non sale items, all purchases do count toward your dollar amounts.
  • Excludes shipping/handling costs. Item costs only.
  • Only purchase dollars from transactions with the shops in this list and made between 12:01 a.m. Etsy Time, November 12, 2008 and 11:59 p.m. Etsy time, November 17, 2008 qualify.

Winners will be announced on our team blog: http://boomersandbeyond.blogspot.com on Thursday, November 20, 2008 at NOON Etsy Time. You must come by and look for the winner’s Etsy ID names listed there. Winners have 3 (three) days to convo (contact) the teambbest shop with their mailing address, or they will forfeit their prize and subsequent names will be drawn.

You can play either or both ways. Odds of winning depend on number of entries received.

Each shop owner has their own sale style and terms, which you will find in their shop announcement.

We are all convo friendly. Do not hesitate to contact us with your questions or requests! Thank you for shopping with us and HaPpY HoLiDaYs!

Participating BBEST Team Shops for It’s A Wonderful Sale 2008:

ART:

CRAFT SUPPLIES & CREATIONS:

FABRIC & YARN ARTS:

GLASS:

HOME DECOR ART:

JEWELRY:

PHOTOGRAPHY:

POLYMER CLAY ART:

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