No use crying over spilled dishes giveaway

One of the things I was the most nervous about before Renegade craft fair was "what if I break something" this fear was quite intensified by the fact that they placed my booth right by a soccer field (the ball made it into the booth quite a few times...) and a tornado alert in Brooklyn.

As it happened, nothing broke at the fair, however, upon returning to the safety of the studio, I managed to break 3 dishes! a glass, a Japanese cup and a coffee cup, which left this Saucer all alone in the world...

So I decided to see if I can find it a happy home and throw a giveaway raffle! it's a very sweet saucer with birds on a pink background.

All you need to do to win this is become my friend on facebook, then leave a comment in this post so I'll know who you are. if you are already my friend on facebook, just leave a comment.

Raffle will be held on July 28.

Give the poor bird a home, you know you want it...

Coloring book Giveaway

This blog seem to take a turn into random thoughts, dreams and feelings, and I feel like I haven't wrote anything coherent here in ages...

Anyway, here is a proof that I'm still sane and that I'm doing other stuff aside of think, dream and feel. I've been working on a small coloring book, which is something I've been wanting to do for a while. Now that it's done I decided to raffle one of those to everyone who reads my blog.

So if you want to win this lovely package of a coloring book and 5 cool color Crayola crayons, please visit my store and tell me what's your favorite thing in there.

Also, if you buy anything from my store, you automatically win one of those little books.

I'm going to raffle the book on April 6th.

Enjoy!

Tarts!

Look at my new amazing tarts!

This story start a long time ego and involves swaps, gifts, an elephant bowl and plate and just one of those connections with someone sweet I knew from online and never thought to meet face to face. Everything changed a couple of weeks ago, when I swapped one of the Koi fish tapas plate with her, then a couple of days later, she e-mailed me the sweetest e-mail about coming to NY to be a guest in the Martha Stuart show and asking if I wanted to meet in person.

I'm really shy and making plans and returning e-mails can be really difficult sometimes, but I decided that I'm not going to let this one slip by and wrote back. So today we met, had coffee, food and talked for a really long time, and I got those beautiful felt tarts she made!

I know it's felt, but I'm still tempted to try and eat them, just in case.

Thanks Sharon! you rock!

Rockabilly blog winner!

Remember a couple of weeks ago, I announced a rockabilly special blog raffle?!well it's time ot see who won it.

Only 12 people signed up for this raffle, which surprised me, because this is the biggest gift I ever offered on raffle, I wonder if it means that it doesn't matter what you offer as a prize on a raffle, or that this was simply not to everyone's taste.

At any rate - thanks for all participants, and congratulations to Cabootique who is the winner!

Stay tune! I'm going to announce the next raffle in the beginning of next week.

You'd be making more sales if only...

While looking through different stores with no sales, I was trying to figure out why do some stores have great success on Etsy, and some doesn't at all. it feels to me like there are a lot of really awesome artists out there who makes beautiful stuff and still don't make any sales, and so this is another part of my "You'd be making more sales if only..."

You'd be making more sales if only I know what you were making!

Sounds strange, right? stores who make stuff you don't know what it is or what you'll be getting, however this is a pretty common phenomenon and a mistake I actually tend to do sometimes as well, even though I know it's a stupid thing to do.

For this review let me introduce first the super cool shop called COUNTER CULTURE CRAFTZ, which makes T shirts. The store is opened since July 10th 2008, but all the listings are from May 11, so either I caught the store on it's debuted day or they just renewed everything. At any rate, their designs are fresh, funny and very well design, I especially like this cool shirt:



Shirt?! where is the shirt? all I see is a super cool design, but this listing only have one photo and this is it. The listing text specify that they use reclaimed T-Shirts, and so, if buyer specify their size and preference of color, they'll do what they can to match it.

Why is this a problem? because it is. Because I'm not just buying a design, I'm buying a product, and the product is a combination of many things - a cut, a design, a color, the price, size, general feeling toward it and the photos of it on the site.

I understand that doing the design is the most fun part that take the most time and effort for an artist (or T shirt designer) and that the practicalities of buying shirts, producing the shirt by printing, washing and ironing the shirt both before and after the printing stage, taking photos and editing them, which with fashion means finding a model is a lot of hard work and a investment of money that might or might not repay itself - however, I've seen so many great designs for T shirts in the past that due to bad printing or bad color combination or just use if crappy materials, looks like shit. And I wouldn't want to own them even though the design of the print might be very cool.

More then this, I like wearing "reclaimed" t-shirts (which, lets face it, a kinder words for I bought those shirts for 1$ in the salvation army store) however, when I got to the salvation army store, I don't like all the shirts I see there, some are too old, some are too stretched, some T shirts cut just don't look good on me, some have holes - each of us have their own pet peeves about reclaimed cloths and it's impossible for me, as a buyer, to know whether I want to buy the shirt or not without seeing it before hand.

Because COUNTER CULTURE CRAFTZ decided to focus only on the design in their listing, I'm missing a lot of other information - how is this printed? is this done in that horrible printer iron on paper that wash away after 3 days? is if silk print? is it gocco (which means the printed area is going to be really small) If this is silk screen is the ink water or oil based (some people have allergies), is it printed in black? can I have a different color print if I want a black shirt? and so on.

While the artist puts most of the effort in the design, for the buyer, the design is just a part of the reason for why we buy something. Especially while selling online, it's super important to give all the information you possibly can or you will not make a sale.

What can they do to fix it?

There are a few options - the first is to do this right - designate a certain budget for this project, make the screens for silkscreen, buy 10-30 T shirts to start, get the inks, and print the T shirt, either shoot this yourself or get a pro photographer, and a model and get great photos of a beautiful person wearing the shirt, list every shirt separately, using the design as it is now as one of the images, and promote your store like hell to cover your expenses and make some money.
If it's too expensive to do this with all the designs focus on your 3 best designs and print in different colors \ sizes.

This is not always possible, so a few things that can improve things as they are.

1. Skip the "reclaimed" shirt and use ones from a known brand (I know American Apparel sells cheap when you buy bulk) - the advantage is that people can go to their store and look at the colors \ sizes and know the manufacturer. The downside of this is that even in bulk, the price per shirt will not be 1$ - the seller will have to spend more money per shirt and so the price of shirts sold will have to go up.

2. Offer those as a Custom order shirt - a person interested will send a convo to the seller, they'll make the shirt, list it as reserved and if the buyer likes the way it looks, they buy it.
The problem here is that this is not only a risky business (try selling a magenta XXXL T shirt with banana yellow print to someone else cause your original buyer didn't like it) and also, a lot of people who might like the design would not want to bother going into the interaction of ordering, waiting, looking at the design again and so on. They would just buy a different T shirt from someone else.

3. Fake it - find a good photo of someone wearing a blank shirt (or shoot one) and impose the image on the shirt in photoshop. The problem here is though it will indicate some information, like the color, placement and size of the printing, it still doesn't indicate any information about how the actual shirt will look.

4. give me more information - explain the process, explain where you get the shirt what what you do with them to make sure they don't have that old lady smell you get buying in thrift shops, let me know that you only pick shirts with no holes or stains on them, if using reclaimed shirts is a part of your philosophy, explain it to me. It might not insure all possible buyers, but it might insure some of them and you'll make more sales.

I do home that COUNTER CULTURE CRAFTZ will overcome their listing problems, because I think their designs are really cool and finny and I hope they'll make a lot of sales in the future.

You'd be making more sales if only...

As a part of my "Yay Money" project and researching stores with no sales I thought it might be cool to write about some of the stores I'm getting to see but don't buy from (by the way, I ordered 3 things already and waiting for them to arrive so I can write about them). I feel a little strange criticizing other people's business choices without them even asking for it, and I'm sure different things works for different people and also that people use Etsy in different ways. However, I think this is a good way for me to review some of my own Etsy experiences and share what works and doesn't work for me.

Saying that, I've decided to start with a topic that's especially difficult to write and talk about but that a lot of people think of which is:

You'd be making more sales if only your prices were lower

For this review, I'm proud to present the work of Dick Haakman from HaakmanGallery. Dick is a super talented painter, I love his style and sensitivity, and his work is excellent. I especially love his still lives. The store is in existence since March, have 12 beautiful paintings in it and haven't had any sales.

The reasons for it to me is pretty clear, the cheapest item is a 1,000$. I don't know about other shop owners, but in my experience, any single piece that is priced at over 60$ is hard to sell. It's a bit hard to hear, I know, but really, I have not manage to sell a painting for more then that.



Isn't it strange that we go to art galleries and see paintings that sells for thousands and tens of thousands of dollars and yet, we go online and beautiful pieces doesn't sell for a 1,000$ or so?! this have a few reasons:

1. Artists makes only a fraction of the gallery sale price. I just had the luck of getting a piece ready to be in a gallery show, Ned got a photo in an art book and a show, we had to do the math to price it. printing was about 150$, though we were lucky to claim a favor and get the print for free. Frame was 300$, the gallery takes 50% of final sell price. Basically, we priced the piece at 1,200$ and after gallery fee and frame, made 300$ of it, if we had to pay for printing it would be even less (or we'll have to push the price up) If we had an agent or manager, or signed up with a gallery, we would be getting even less. It really sucks, but that's how it is, after expenses, materials, gallery fee and so on, the artist makes about 10-25% of the sale price in a gallery.

2. Galleries appeal to collector while Etsy, mostly, target people who wants something cool to put in their apartment. Why is this important?! because A collector is a lot more likely to spend a lot of money on a piece they think (and mostly because the gallery endorse the artist) the piece will be worth more in the future, most people don't have a 1,000$ to spend on a painting if it's entire purpose is decorate a room.

When the artist is more famous and successful. It's a strange and pretty unfair vicious cycle, but that's the gallery business - when a gallery show an artist in their space they are basically saying "We think this person is worth taking notice off" the more the artist does this, the more they get attention and the value of their pieces go up.

It's strange to think about it, but the same piece can be worth 10$ or a million dollar depends on the history of the artist's fame and exhibition history.

So - what can be done?
What can Dick Haakman do to make sure he does generate some sales?!

Even though I read his profile, I can't really know how much his art worth as far as investments goes, if a collector do goes on Etsy, it would be helpful to have his exhibition history and, if possible, contacts in those galleries and links to those galleries so they can check if this is a good investment, lets say his last show was super successful and every painting sold for 10,000$ - then suddenly paying a 1,000 for one of his pieces seem like a great idea.

If Dick is targeting collector, he would need to draw them to Etsy on his own, as far as I know, most of those buy things through galleries, because that the gallery endorsement of an artist means that they stand a better chance of making money of the investment and because each piece that sells in a gallery makes the artist more incline to succeed in getting exhibited more and selling for higher prices in the future, which means the collector again, stand a better chance at making money of their investment.
And so - if Dick already sold some pieces and he is in connection with the collector, this is a good time to send them e-mails referring them to his store, also, it might be a good idea to look for galleries that show the same style of art and send them e-mails or letters urging them to check his online gallery.

Lets say both those plans doesn't work, it means Dick will probably have to find a way to lower his prices, if he wants to make any sales.
I know it takes a long time to make a painting and he might not want to, and so there are a few ways to create a product that would not take as much time and so he can price them cheaper:

1. Make smaller pieces - this is what I do, when I started selling paintings on Etsy I priced them at 70-60$ - non of it sold, one day I took a piece of paper I was about to start drawing on and cut it to 4 - it took me about the same amount of time to make 4 small paintings as it took me to make 1 big one - the painted surface was about the same, I priced each at 20$ - overall, I made more money of the sale of 4 small painting, but each buyer paid less for an original painting.

Strangely enough, a lot of people who saw the smaller cheap paintings bought 3-4 of them, they paid the same amount that they would for 1 big one, but I think the feeling of getting a good deal - a few paintings, made it easier for people to spend 80$.
Like those - some of those paintings are slightly larger then a postcard, but are strong enough to change a room.

2. Make Digital prints - either get a great scan or a great photograph of the painting, and do either a limited edition or an open edition of the artwork. The benefit of this is that even if you sell them for cheap, you only have to do the work on one - if you make a closed edition of 100 prints, and sell each for 20$ (if they all sell, which will be awesome) the artist get to make the 2,000$ AND keep the original painting to sell later or for himself. Like Peppermint - those are awesome (and cheap!)

3. Art Prints - this means learning an new method of work and maybe change style, but either doing block printing, etching, silk screens, gocco or monotype, means you can produce a work of art that have multiple copies, which means you both retain the artistic mechanics of work and can sell each copy for relatively cheap. Like Marissa's beautiful shop - she has a very successful Block prints shop, that sells beautiful and very affordable prints.

Whatever Dick Haakman chooses to do, I hope he gets lucky and sell everything in his shop! do check it out, his art is gorgeous!

yay!money!

Remember when a while ago I won 250$ in the apartment therapy tutorial competition?!that was about a month ago and the money stayed in my paypal account till now, I already had one nightmare about not spending it fast enough. There were just too many choices and wonderful things on Etsy that I want and I just couldn't decide.

And so, though the reasonable thing to do would be to spend it on some heirloom piece that would service me for a long time, like a leather bag or spend it all on 25 pounds of fudge, this money kept making me think of the first sale I ever had on Etsy. It was on late November, when I decided to pick up my long abandon store and make and list at least one thing every month to see what happens. Now, making one thing and listing it a day look like an easy work day, but then it looked like quite a challange. I've been doing it for 2 weeks, trying to promote and getting pretty discouraged, and then I sold a sock puppet I made to the awesome Queancy Pearson. It suddenly made all this making-money-of-art thing looks possible and that though it was a bit of a rude awakening to list things that I loveingly made for pretty small change and still not having people rush to buy everything, a little reality worth so much more then a hige fantasy.

And so I thought that the best thing I can do with a 250$ in Etsy money would be to give this awesome experience to other sellers and make them realise that they to, can make some money from making stuff.

So, for the next couple of weeks i'm going on a shopping spree in stores who never had a sale (I might bend the rules if I see something I really want and the store had very few sales so far), I'm going to try not to spend more then 25$ in each store, and try ot give this cool experience to 10 people. Also, I'm going to review the stores I'm buying from and hope that the blog feature will get them some more exposure.

I'm going to try one more thing in my search of stores that didn't get any sales yet - If I come across any that don't make sales for a reason that look obvious to me, I'm going ot critique them, again hoping the exposure would get them some attention.

If you are or you know any cool shops with no sales yet that you would like me ot critique or buy something from, please comment here. I can't promis to buy or critique any of those, but I will take a look at what they make, so at least they'll get some views out of it.

A tale of 2 cities

I always feel very odd when people ask me where I'm from or where I live. I guess both New York and Tel Aviv are perceived by me as home, even though I haven't visited Tel Aviv for almost a year now.

A couple of days ago, Sharona, the queen of the Etsy Israeli team asked me to participate in a collaborative activity with her team, the assignment was to create one of the letters for their new blog's banner. I made the S in the word ETSY not ISRAEL.

It made me feel so good to be included in an activity that's going on in Israel!

Google Analytics

Look I'm on the front page again! how cool is that!

This is one of those blog entries who would really interest only people who are on Etsy, but hell - I'm going to write it anyway cause I'm excited and also need to put things in order inside my brain.

Yesterday, after not doing it for a very long time, I went into the Etsy forum, It's a stressful place to hang out that usually makes me both loose a couple of hours before I even notice, and get me very angry about ususally very small things (like a person that makes another acount just ot put themselves in treasuries or expectations to lower shipping rates and so on) but it's still one of the best place to learn about what's new in Etsy and catch somw usful information and non usful gossip.

So the big piece of news I found was that now, I could finally link google analytics to my Etsy store. I've been using google analitics with all my other websites (yes, there are a lot of those...) and most of the time it's just a nice ego pat in the back to see how many people are seeing my sites, also, when views drop I know it's time to update the sites, it's also a good way to see if I was featured anywhere and other such interesting things.

I really wanted to have analytics on the Etsy store, mostly for that ego pet in the back - when nothing sales for a week and I get really worried, it would cheer me up to know that things are still working and people are still looking in my shop.
I honesly didn't expect and suprises.

Boy - what I wrong!

This is the interesting things I've learn from less then 24 hours of data (I installed it at about 4:00 AM last night, and the numbers I have so far are true to about 4:00 PM)

Big surprise number 1
I had 80 views so far, I didn't update my store today neither renew or list anything new, and still the store generated a really nice amount of views, much more then I expected. I always assumed that on non listing days I have about 0-20 views (seeing the view count change on the first few listed items). This is really good to know and makes me a little less stressed out about renewing or listing all the time. Right now I either list or renew an avrage of 5 items a day, knowing that on a no list day I still get visits, makes me want to rethink the whole "renewing" thing alltogether, or at least do it less. This will definitly save me some money.

Big surprise number 2
30 of the 80 views were direct. That means that people who visited my store knew where they were going cause their either RSS it or bookmark it or go and check it on their own accord. I think this is super cool, I really didn't expect this amount of direct traffic at all. I've been thinking and puting a lot of efort in preserving repete costumers and making sure people who buy from my store would feel comfortable to do so again, and it's really nice to see this is working (I know that at least one of those 30 people is my sister who will not buy from my store cause she can have anything she wants for free, but still...)

Big surprise number 3
I always assumed that my main and probably only useful marketing tool was flickr, I actually often encourage etsy people to use it to promote their stores and was sure this was the tool that divery most trafic to my Etsy store. My reasoning was this - I get a lot of views on flickr, so a certain % of those people go and check my store. Frickr indeed diverted some traffic to my store, but actually a lot less then I thought - only 4 hits came out of flickr. I have about 500 hits on flickr on avrage so 4 hits on the store out of 500 is a pretty crappy turn up, much less then I expected.
My blog however, generated 2 hits to theEtsy store, while only having about 10 hits for itself.

Why is this important?! because it means that even though less people read the blog then the people who see my flickr account, they are more likely to see my store (probably cause the blog have etsy mini with images on it, while in flickr, you have to move from the photo page, to my profile, to a link to the store) so even though it feels redundent to update a blog that only have about 20-30 readers a day in avrage - it's not! and I could and should aspire to emprove the blog to have more readers.

Big surprise number 4
And this one is a really big shock! my larger sorce of entries, as said, were direct hits, but second, with 18 hits was.... (drum roll...) google! can you believe it?! 18 people got into my store by searching things. This means that:
1) I'm really good at tagging and choosing words to use in my descriptions.
2) There is always room for emprovment and I should look more into what makes strong keywords (well, aside of XXX and sex).

What were people looking for that lead them ot my etsy store?!
the most common words were Etsy and Etsy.com after that were Blue bondage, perfect tea set, owl shaped mug, Illustration + humble, circa ceramics, paper menagerie, interesting historical events and a few other words.

At a first glance this seem really random, but then I figure out that at least one of the words in each of those searches was in the title of the listing (aside of etsy and etsy.com of course) - why is this important?! Because it means that titles as far as google search robots are concern, probably worth more then taggs. So, I am going to try and keep my titles as descriptive as possible.

Since if some wants a painting of an owl they will not searcg for "painting" or "art" but for "owl painting", I should include that topic rather then just the item in the title. Sometime I do list something as "a tea cup" but I should list it as "a handpainted tea cup with owls" or something like that. The more information, and the more exciting and relevant the title is, the better.

I've seen people on etsy go for interesting titles before, like "sunshine and stars necklace" to describe a necklace that has gold and silver in the pendent - I always thought it was sweet and goot marketing, but now I realize that they need ot have a more descriptive less fancyful title if they want to potimise their lisitngs for search angines. The thing is that a buyer who's looking for a necklace that's made of gold and silver will google "gold and silver necklace".

There are more things to analize I'm sure, but I think that even just those 4 facts are going to really change how I market my store and how I percive selling and making sales.

Thanks so much etsy for solving the analytics problem and making it possible for me ot use this tool.

An annoying morning

In the past couple of weeks I've been waking up with a mild anxiety every morning, I think I just feel a little aimless since the show in Chicago was done and not quite sure how to get back into a work routine since Christmas vacation.

So this morning, it was topped by an e-mail from a buyer who said he understand from my listing that he's going to get 4 cups while actually getting one. It's sort of sucky since the price was 25$ - which mean s that to him my work is basically 6$ per cup.

I know I shouldn't measure myself as one person who had a misunderstanding see me, I get a lot of nice responds all the time and why should I listen to the one person who doesn't like it or doesn't like it enough to pay 25$ for one cup. I sold a bunch of those and nobody had any problems so far.

Somehow that's bee grating at my nerves all day. Being misunderstood is a big fear of mine.

Even buying 2 books didn't help alleviate the crappy feeling, which is sort of disappointing, since I very rarely do the retail therapy thing...

knockout items photography tutorial

There are two questions that keep coming up in the Etsy Forum help section, one is about how to take better pictures and the second is about those 4 tiny items on the etsy header. I was taking photos of an item for the louchelust store today and I though it would be a good opportunity to make a photoshop tutorial for how to take a photo on a totally clear white background, those seem to appear in treasuries more and also, become candidate for "knockout" items.

So here is goes:


The most important thing is to start off with a good picture, even though there's a lot you can fix in photoshop, it's better and quicker if you start with a clear good shot. I used absolutely no artificial lighting to shoot those panties. I just shot next to the window and had beautiful natural light. To get a white background, I use foam core. It's inexpensive and pretty solid, so you don't get wrinkles or strange shadows like you get when shooting on paper.

I take 6-7 photos of each possession of the item and choose the best one. This is the picture that I started with:



Not so bad - but as you can see, the background is not white and there are some spots that really shouldn't be there.



I use the "info" window to check the amount of color there is in the back ground. also the surface looks white, it's actually containing quite a lot of color: 7% cyan, 6% magenta and 10% yellow. in order to achieve clear white, those numbers should be all at 0. as you are working, go back to the info and check those numbers often - also, check in different parts of the image. In this photo for instance the numbers on the left side was higher (which means the background was darker).

So, I started working on it:


The first thing I did was ad an curve adjustment layer (from the layer>new adjustment layer>curve) when you begin working with this, a window open and a curve appear, I pushed the whites (the higher dot on the curve up to make the whites in the picture whiter. Also, I pushed the dark part of the curve down a bit to maintain the darker colors in the image and make it more contrast. Look at the picture while you do it and be gentle, if you do it too much you'll get a clear background but loose a lot of details in the photo.



It was getting better but still I had some color in the background. So I added another adjustment layer - this time, using level (layers>new adjustment layer> levels) This leads to a window that looks like a histogram - look at the white side of the scale (on the right) as you can see, there's a small area where there's very little information, before the histogram start - that area is the pure whites. There's a little "noise" in it push the triangle till where the histogram actually start - again, if you do this too much you'll loose details, so be gentle...




Remember before I started - the right side of the photo was lighter then the left?! so now, if I look at the numbers in the "info" window, I have total white on the right (woohoo!) and still a little bit of color on the left (3% cyan, 2% magenta, 8% yellow) so I still need to do some work. There are a lot of different ways to get rid of it, but this is what I chose to do in this case:



I loosely picked the outline leaving all the shadow of the item inside the selection - it what makes the photo looks real, and I didn't want to lose that.



I inversed the selection (Select>inverse) to get only the background area picked and not the item.



I use the feather option to soften the harsh line of the selection, I chose 10 px, actually I could probably use 20 or 30 and it would work well, and even better but this is how I did it...

I press the delete button to erase the left over color on the background - pay attention to the layer you are on and don't accidentally delete a part of the adjustment layers - it will make the problem worse...


As you can see, there's still a little bit of a harsh line there, even with the feather. So I used a large eraser brush (choose the eraser tool and a large brush (I used the 200px for this). to soften up this line.



There - much much better!

Last thing - resize the image. I always work on largest files possible - it allow more details to be included in the picture, and for me to have more options in working on the small details of it.

The most important thing to remember is subtleties, the first mistake people do in photoshop is to over do it, leading to a too bight, to saturated image that just look unreal and bad. always keep as much of the original photo information there, It would have been easier to just delete all the white to pure while in this case, but then the item would look like it's cut out of it's background. By keeping the original shadow, The item looks natural and good on the white background.

There are about 100 other ways to do this, but this is usually what works for me...

Inspiration Bags freebi gifts!

I have 20 cool inspiration goody bags to give away to anyone who buy anything from my shop, each bag contains a lovely unique notebook, a mini set of inspiration cards (5-6 cards) and a hand painted book mark. Also lucky number 13 will receive an awesome surprise prize that's handmade by me and priced at about 30$.

This great goody bag can be yours with any purchase from my shop - just type in the code InspireMe in the "massage to seller" box when you place your order.

This coupon is available while supply lasts. there are 20 bags so be quick about it!

My store is: http://louchelab.etsy.com

Experiement day 10

Yesterday, I thought it would be a good idea to renew the 5 items I've been renewing each day at around noon and see if I get more views. In the evening I checked, a book that had 26 views suddenly had 250! I thought I just cracked the secret to the whole renewing thing, but then noticed that an art kit with 67 views, has 51 all of a sudden, and then, scrolling down, it seem that nothing had the amount of views it was supposed to...

A search in Etsy forum showed that there was some big system update and now, the whole thing is supposed to be working better. However, as far as recording views, this was not a good day... So today I repeated the experiment and renewed 5 items at around noon.

So far, in the 3 days of batch renewing I had no sales, I'm disappointed, I wonder if it's because my presence is less noticeable or maybe because renewing every hour or so, made me also comment in the forum, change the featured item in my shop and be more active in Etsy in general. Also, it might be because I haven't listed any new thing in the past couple of days, a small project turned into a huge project somehow, I hope to finish it by the end of the weekend.

So, here is the numbers for today!

Item renewed (Noon)
Birds lover ornaments - 8$ - views 12
Pelvic - Original Painting - 40$ - views 13
Stand and Deliver Journal - 30$ - views 11
Pink Squirrel - Art Kit - 35$ - views 13
Pocket knife Card Case - 20$ - views 12

The interesting fact is this - renewing at 8:00 PM and renewing at noon had just about the same result - even though the listing at noon had 8 more hours to go, I think that it means that overall renewing in the evening is better then during the morning, cause there are more people on Etsy looking for them. As before, renewing 5 items at once didn't cause the items in the back of the list to get less attention then the one in the front.

Item listed - Non, still working on a big project, pretty happy with the way it's going, I illustrated 32 different things in 2 days! that's a lot!

Sales - none...

Hearts - 1081 - 10 hearts in 2 days!

So, numbers so far:
money spend on listing: 2.40$
Money spend on renewing: 10$
Money earned: 204$

I think I might have to publish some teasers for the new project tomorrow, I'm too excited about it not to...

Experiment day 7

This is the last day of stage one of the renewal project. It went pretty well so far. The bad news is that the 2 item sale from yesterday got canceled. It was a funny story of birthday present, 2 confused people, one of which trying to surprised the other, and other misunderstanding. So sadly, I'm a little behind. However, the good news is that a deck of tarot card got bought this morning, just out of the blue, I didn't renew that one or anything - but I'm sure the renewing did help.

So here are the numbers for today:

Item renewed
10:00 - Maps and Legends - Reader Kit - 28$ - views 33
11:00 - O solitude - Original painting - 45$ - views: 16
12:30 - Morning - Original painting - 25$ - views: 15
2:00 - Rocky Raccoon - 22$ - views: 13
4:00 - Summer apple Art Kit - 35$ - views: 4
8:00 - Heart - Original Art - 40$ - views: 20

Item listed
Lilly squirrle Notebook - 17$

Item sold
The Black Lilly Deck of Tarot - 60$

Hearts 1067 (weepee)

So, result so far:
money spend on listing: 1.80$
Money spend on renewing: 7$
Money earned: 194$

Tomorrow I'm going to try the second phase of the experimen, and renew all 5 items in a batch!

Project Renewal

I was reading some tread on the etsy forum today where people recommended different things to jump start sells and told what they did to make their store work better. One of the things many people mentioned how renewing and listing often helps a lot! I usually list something every day or two, but I'm going to try and do better now.

I've decided to check this theory by spending a 1$ each day on renewing and listing, meaning, about 5 items either new or renewed per day. I'm going to try two things. In the first week of the experiment, I'm going to list or renew 5 items in different hours of the day, while at the second week of renewing, I'm going to renew all of them at once.

I'm going to put in some numbers in my blog everyday to see if this works in any way to make my sells get a little better.

So here's today's numbers:

Items renewed:
past present future - a set of 3 drawings for 40$
opossum sewing kit - 20$
a cups set of tarot cards - 40$
a fox - 25$

New items:
a painting called strange summer, which I did today at a coffee shop while ned was at the gym escaping the heat of the apartment - 15$

Number of hearts - 1042

Book Making Day

A few months ago in preparing to a truck show at Ned's mom's house, I made 8 books in 2 days! It went well and they came out beautiful, 6 of them actually sold, however, I think I lost my taste for it after that, it was just a bit too much. However, today, I was back to it and it was very rewarding to discover that I was still able to make them and didn't even need a reminder of how to do it.

The reason for the return to book binding was this custom order:



I suggested this to a really nice girl who was looking for a gift for her boyfriend for when she's away on a trip to NY. I remembered reading in a a Chuck Palahniuk book about an old sailors wife's tradition of writing a diary in their husband's absence so that upon his return, he'll know what went on. I made her 2 matching diaries so they can both write their thoughts and experience while they are apart.

The cover shows a portrait of them and a quote from an EE Cummings poem.

Since I was already making books, I also made one for the store, it's a beautiful Art Nouveau inspired book with a fancy lady on the cover.

Our Wedding

This was such an amazing experience, right before I left for Israel, I got contacted by Etsy's video article expert Tara Young who wanted to do a video article about us. I send her a written story a couple of months before when they asked for stories about handmade weddings. We manage to schedule the shoot a couple of days before my trip and so it was a wonderful surprise to be able to see this movie all edited and made on the day I returned. It's hard for me to not think I look stupid on camera, but I really love the way it came out. with the trip to Israel and all, and this feeling like such an important time in our relationship and life in general, it's really wonderful to have this beautiful overview of the beginning of our love.

I'm leaveing, on a jet plane...

So, I haven't written here in a while and it's mostly because things got so busy and crazy there was just no time for it. I was supposed to make monthly goals and stuff like that and summarize the month, but too many good things happened and now, I'm just finishing everything up.

First piece of good news is that I was selected from all the thousands of Etsy stores to be featured artist in the beginning of last week, I answered the interview's questions feeling really stupid and condescending, but Ned said it was good so I send it. I made 20 sales in 2 days... but even more wonderful was getting an overwhelming amount of e-mails from people who really liked what I said and wanted to say hi and thanks.

Something cool happened a couple of days later, one of Etsy's people contact me about doing a video podcast about me and Ned - and I said yes, I wrote her a long e-mail about a month and a half before when she asked about people who had "handmade weddings" and forgot all about it, she came over and talked to us in front of a camera, we were both feeling goofy, but I think we did pretty good. It was really fun.

The third thing is that I'm flying to Israel tomorrow. I'm excited and scared and sad to be without Ned and also to be a tourist in my homeland. I'm taking the new laptop with me that got the name "dellgato" somehow (well, it's a dell) and I'll be posting from there.

Some thought about promotion

I posted a thread in the etsy forum today, it has to do with the good feeling of actually making money on Etsy and feeling like I'm doing well (it's a whole different story and might be told in a different time). I got a lot of really kind responses congratulating me about the making money thing. Also, it was really nice to see people referring to my success as something to aspire to. Also, I got a really nice e-mail from a fellow selling asking me about where do I promote my etsy store.

This made me think, I mean we are all looking for places to promote our stores, however, that very allusive "promotion" thing that we all want to know, it "where" and not "how".

So I'm going to write a couple of thought about promotion and the how rather then the who that I was trying to put into words while writing that e-mail.

The How of promotion

2 restaurants opened up in my neighborhood this past summer. One's called Blackbird parlor and the other is called paper moon cafe. Now they both sell very nice food and both are owned and managed by very nice people, however, the first is doing really really well, while the second is totally empty.

Why is that? honestly, there is not one reason, it's location and it's the fact that the one who's doing well is owned by someone with experience in the restaurant industry and the other isn't. But the main thing, at least for me is this:

While the owner and manager of Blackbird parlor became a part of the Williamsburg community, the owner and manager of Paper moon has not.

Taking to the first means I'm hearing news about people who lives here, how other restaurants are doing, different things that happened on Bedford st. and their plans for the future. When he's not busy inside, he stand in the street corner and talk to people, make friends.

Looking at Black bird it's obvious that there was a lot of research about what people in Williamsburg, like, both the design (sort of a log cabin with French inspiration) and the menu were made to accommodate what people here already wanted and like.

Papermoon is empty almost all the time, both the design and menu are very foreign to the area (county cottage and meat loaf?!). When talking to the owner, I always got to hear about what's wrong with all the other restaurants in the area. He lives out of town and doesn't know most of the restaurants in Williamsburg.

There is so much to be learned form this. However what I really want to stress, with relations to my etsy store, is the importance of being a part of a community.

In a book about marketing called get back in the box by Douglas Roshkoff, the author describe a conversation he had with a client, the client wanted an advertising campaign that would be "less Saatchi and more craigslist".

What is the difference? the difference is that in a typical advertising campaign, the voice of one - the advertiser speak to many. One person or organization produce content and the viewers give that person their attention, later on, they might also give him their money in exchange of goods.

Craigslist, however, is a community based website, much like etsy, people who sell on it also buy on it, you can find yourself looking for a roommate one day, selling your old stereo the next. which means, that you are both the viewer and the advertiser.

This means there is a huge difference between advertising and online promoting. In advertising, all you do is create content for people to look at, in promoting, you become, much like the owner of blackbird - a part of your community. The difference is, that you don't just expect attention, you also give it. You become a persona in your own online world, not in order to sell a specific scarf you made, but in order to produce an online imprint who will generate attention and traffic to your store.

I know it sound strange, almost imperceivable, but a comment on someone else's blog may generate more traffic then a blog entry. Featuring another artist's work in your blog will also probably generate more traffic to both your blog and your store (first of all that person will want to read it and then probably will direct other people to read it, and feel more incline ot wrote about you in forums and blogs and so on).

A picture of your cute cat on flickr will probably generate more traffic into your flickr page and as a result, probably your etsy store then a photo of a scarf you made and a "check my profile for details" link. Reason being that a cute cat is more interesting and cute for people to look at then a scarf. A tutorial would probably get more then both, because it's also useful and interesting.

The goal of promotion, strangely enough is not to generate sales or traffic, but to generate attention and a large as possible web imprint that leads to you and to your store. not to attract "buyers" but to attract people, make friends and be known. And just like being active in conversation will make you more friends then just standing around - being active as both a viewer and an advertiser will be more effective then being just an advertiser.

Places to promote (again, make yourself a part of those communities, just throwing some pictures around once, doesn't help at all):

Flickr
We Love Etsy
IndiPublic
Cut out+ Keep
Trunkt (if you can get in, I haven't...)

Trade Up!

2 new books arrived in the mail in the past couple of days and I wanted to show them off! I approached two book artist a couple of weeks ago and offered to trade, it's a nice way to move stocks about and also to get wonderful stuff from people that i don't know how to make myself.

I'm so glad I offered the trades, I really couldn't be happier with what I get, also, seeing how other etsy seller wrap their stuff and what they send the package with is very inspiring and educational.

So, without farther a due, my new books!

AnneClarkDesigns




This books comes from a beautiful jewelery makes and a book artist called Anne, this book is made of beautiful marbled paper that i love, I've never seen this binding before, it's a cross between long stitched and regular European style binding with the stitches exposed. I really love it, it's inspiring me to learn more binding method and already gave me a cool idea for a book.

The end paper is beautiful red pattern and the pages inside are nice and soft. I knew it was going to be a nice book but really, I never expected it to be so awesome! This is going to be my Trip-to-Israel sketchbook, I hope I can fill the whole thing in the 2 weeks I'm going to be there next month.

Really, I can't stress enough how awesome this book is, you should all get one at Anne's store

Painted Fish Studio


This is the second book I got, the price on it was really really low, and I couldn't understand why, I thought I might be reading the measurement wrong or something, however, it turned out that i didn't, this is amazingly made, the materials are really top quality and the whole thing is so awesome I still don't understand why she doesn't charge 5 times more at least for it.

This is a beautiful old fashion style album made from black paper and bound in beautiful mustered. the end paper is cool yellow on mustered dots. I'm especially excited about how amazing this is because Ned's going ot use it for a small version of his portfolio to take for meetings with Model, so I'm glad it's going to look great (well, unless I decide I'm taking over).

Jen's store have beautiful books, albums, art prints and other paper craft, her pictures are beautiful and the whole store have a beautiful clean look. Visit painted fish studio!