Technicolor Business Plans!

I had grand plans (and grand spreadsheets!) about an October relaunch of the Etsy store… that just didn’t happen. Between the craft fair and a bunch of other chaos, I never had the time to sit down and revamp the listings like I wanted to.

And I don’t really have the time this month either, which means I’ll miss out on the winter holiday rush. (Apparently most Etsy stores do a good portion of their sales in this timeframe, but historically I haven’t seen that big a bump. So I’m a little bummed, but not horribly.)

However, it does make me wonder about how I really want to go about the relaunch.

Of Methods and Madness

High Tech Craft Fair Magnet Display

I had a great time at the craft fair and the magnets sold much better than expected! (To be fair, I expected to sell none and sold 12 instead. Still not a bad showing for someone who was pretty much unprepared! 😉 )

Part of prepping for the craft fair was going back over all the old magnets looking for damage and sadly I found some (yikes!). Since I need to remove the sold magnets as well as take new pictures of the repaired ones, I figured now was a good time to clean shop.

I’ve gone ahead and deactivated all of the non-Story Prompts listings and am starting to work out a plan for putting things back up… and better storage methods!

Part of me wants to hold off relisting until January 1st, just because of the whole ‘new year, fresh start’ concept, but I don’t know that it really matters. I’m not a high traffic shop, so if I repost things piecemeal (but to schedule) I don’t think it will hurt. A lot of the ‘blitz’ strategies I see online are for repeat-sell items and mine are still mostly OOAK offerings.

I’m not the sort of shop that will ever sell a thousand things in a month… because I can’t make a thousand things in a month! 😉

But I’d still like to have some sort of process in place, so I’m working on a couple blog posts to help hammer this out.

• Product Photography – what kind of pictures I need to take and the best method to take them.
• Listing Text – how to title things, tag them, consistently describe items, and other details on what the prose of the listings should look like.
• Social Media – what the posting schedule is to each of the channels and starting to put metrics in place to see which channels are worth my time.
• Packaging – hammer out the process of boxing, packing, and shipping so it’s easier than the current madness.
• Blog Posts and Galleries – figure out a better method of posting and curating the finished items to the blog.

For all that I’m getting organized and trying to be a little more professional about this… this is still just a hobby. I’ve made less than $100 this year from all of the artwork and I’ve spent way more than that on materials and overhead.

But hopefully the research will help bring down that overhead some and maybe be useful to other folks who are trying to be more than a hobby on Etsy! 🙂