Make It

Why you should have a blog + my love of cooking

I have been loving Twitter. Thanks to those of you who have added me to your lists. I realize that most of my tweets seem to be food related, which is just fine with me. Cooking and food is a passion of mine and I think this is why I've jumped wholeheartedly into my soapmaking research. Making soap is alot like cooking, and you can even use natural/edible elements. You don't want to eat the final product of course, but ingredients like oatmeal, honey, green tea, cocoa and coffee would not be out of place in a bar of the scrubby stuff.

I'm taking some of my soap inspiration from food items in my home and I'd love the concept of starting out with a line of tea-inspired soaps containing ground up bits of tea leaves. I don't like caffeine so I've never been a coffee drinker and I was pretty indifferent towards tea until I had loose leaf tea. Specifically loose leaf tea from Tea Zone, my favorite tea spot down the street from our old place in Cambridge. Before moving to Michigan, I stocked up on tea from Tea Zone and just looking through the names of the blends that I have, I'm inspired to create a soap with each of them: Cream Earl Grey (my fave!), Ginger Green, Vanilla Rooibos, Blueberry White, Apricot Black, Mango Rooibos, Ginger Mate, Peach Rooibos, Mint Green, Peony White, White Chocolate Chai.

I definitely see some tea-inspired soaps in my future. I highly recommend Tea Zone for your tea needs. They're cheap, but not low-quality, and a family-owned biz. If you're near Somerville, check it out in person, they make any iced tea in the shop iced or hot.

Speaking of food, I have another anecdote for you regarding my new place of work, Zingermans. Last week I got an order from one of the founders of the company! This was super exciting for me and I asked how the buyer found me. I assumed it's because I'm a new employee and he somehow saw my resume but turns out he's got a Google Alerts set to notify him whenever Zingermans' name appears on the web (I've got this for Rifferaff as well, set your own for your biz here) and this blog post last week turned up in his email as one of the Google Alerts. He clicked through to my blog, checked out my shop, and made an order! In addition to the order, I was also put in touch with another company employee who offered assistance with any small business questions I might have. This is a great example of why you need a blog if you don't already have one and how blogs can directly lead to sales and connections. If you do have a blog, make sure you're posting regularly and keeping it professional because you never know who's reading!

Setting goals: Week 7

Here are my Etsy stats* from the past week.

Week 1: 57 sales, (forgot to log my # of hearts)
Week 2: 60 sales, 812 hearts
Week 3: 68 sales, 894 hearts
Week 4: 71 sales, 928 hearts
Week 5: 79 sales, 1004 hearts
Week 6: 96 sales, 1045 hearts
Week 7: 148 sales, 1195 hearts

*Note: these are my total stats, not weekly stats

So I had a big week mostly due to this Design Sponge post. Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone and the holiday season has officially begun I'll continue to promote, relist and keep doing what I've been doing so far. Now I'm going to revise my goal to 200 sales by the end of the year and 1300 hearts. And I have a few giveaways I'll be participating in on other blogs, in addition to next weekend's Shadow Art Fair.

As for my soap project, I've been brainstorming and doing alot of thinking about my ideas, reading about aromatherapy and the various methods of soapmaking. I'm planning to make soap for my holiday presents this year, which will be a kind of trial run to allow me to experiment with production and presentation.

What have you done for your shop in the past week?

Twitter Time

A few quick updates as I sit here counting down the minutes to Thanksgiving dinner.

I joined Twitter! If you're on Twitter or have been thinking of joining, feel free to add me to your followers list: http://twitter.com/rifferaff. Matt's been on Twitter for a while and I've avoided it but now that I've joined I quickly see how addictive this is going to be.

This is a great article in the New York Times about artists as entrepreneurs. I'm especially happy to see it's the number one most emailed article in the business section today. It seems to resonate with alot of readers.

New calendar from Elisabeth, the designer of the holiday papers that have been flying out of my shop the past few weeks. See it and purchase here.

When it rains it pours

(a screen grab from the Etsy front page earlier today. yay!)

Being featured on Design Sponge is like the blog version of being on Oprah. It magically results in lots of sales and high profile visibility. I'll have my usual weekly recap on Friday but if you were to click over to my shop right now you'd see I have not only met my 100 sale goal I've now surpassed it! Thanks to those of you who left such nice comments on the D*S post, I felt like I had a little posse giving me shoutouts over there. :)

The funny thing is, usually that would be the highlight of my week, but aside from Design Sponge I had alot of other things going on this week as well.

I started my training for some part-time seasonal work I'm doing at Zingerman's Mail Order. Zingerman's is an Ann Arbor based high end foods company. It's pretty much an Ann Arbor institution consisting of a deli, a restaurant, a bakery, a creamery and a thriving mail order business. For the holidays they hire 300 seasonal employees for their call center and warehouse to help out with the increased demand for their products. I'll be working the call center so I've had an intense 3-day training with a huge focus on customer service. I'm actually learning quite a lot of skills and ideas I plan to apply to my business. Customer service is a big deal there and they go to ridiculous lengths to please each and every customer and to make it right if there's any kind of problem. I'm kind of looking forward to working the phones and putting these new skills to work.

I also (finally) got an interview for a real job. It would be perfect and I'm really excited about it. *Fingers crossed it goes well.*

This is the first time in I don't know how long, at least 8 years, that I don't have to travel for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I'm looking forward to a low-stress holiday season. Tomorrow we had plans to bounce between two friends' houses for two Thanksgiving dinners but we just found out today that one of the friends is currently in labor. Literally, right now. So looks like we'll just be having the traditional one dinner tomorrow.

I debated whether or not to post this next one but I think it's ok because I'll leave out any identifying info. I got a very special celebrity order! Let me clarify. Someone purchased from my Etsy shop who is the spouse of a famous musician. Not just any famous musician. Said musician is 1/3 of my most favorite group of all time. I kid you not. I obsessively know all the lyrics to all of their songs and I recognized her name instantly because she gets a shoutout in one of their older songs. Of course this was a HUGE thrill for me. I debated whether or not to acknowledge my extreme fandom in my email confirmation or the Thank You note I included with the package, but decided not to. I thought it might be annoying and invasive. I hope posting about it on my blog isn't....

Happy Turkey Day, I'll see you back here on Friday.

Tutorial and Interview at Craftnicity

I did a tutorial for making patterned paper bags over at Craftnicity. While you're there, take a look at my interview and see how I answered this question:

Craftnicity:  If you could design stationery or any other paper product for someone, who would it be and why?What would it look like?

How to get on the Etsy Front Page

Yesterday, my Happy Birthday Dude card was on the Etsy front page. This was a nice surprise. I don't get a notification when something from my shop is featured there, so I usually find out I've been featured by stumbling across it myself or when some other seller emails me to let me know.

For those of you not familiar with how Etsy works. The front page changes every hour and is chosen from treasuries that are curated by members of the site. These members create treasuries by usually starting with a theme or color and then searching the site to find items that meet their criteria. Since I've spent more time on my photos, I've noticed I've appeared in more front pages, so here are some of my tips for other Etsy sellers looking to get more front page time, based on my experience.

Use all 14 tags when listing your item. Think of all the ways someone could search for what you've made, and include those keywords in your tags. Make sure to list the main colors of your item. If someone is doing a treasury of all yellow items, they're probably going to search for the term "yellow" instead of scrolling through pages of listings and looking for yellow in the photos.

Have bright, clear photos. The common theme in all the Front Pages is great photos. I used to upload my photos directly from my camera to my online shop. No more. Now I always first open the photos in GIMP to lighten them up, sharpen them if needed, and then upload them. It always makes a difference. Even if I thought the original photo looked pretty good, it's much better post-editing.

Make yourself visible on Etsy. So say you have the perfect tags for your items, crisp clean photos, but you haven't listed anything in your shop since last week. Your items might be perfect for someone creating a treasury at this very moment, but you're going to be on page 25 of the search results, or worse if you're in a popular category like jewelry or paper goods. Etsy's popularity means that new items are constantly being listed, so you have to do some work to make sure you stay in the first few pages of search results, where shoppers and treasury-makers can find you. Relisting often is one way to do this. Promoting your shop on and off Etsy is another way. Just make sure to get the word out any way you can.

Design Sponge!

Thanks Grace!

Setting Goals: Week 6

Here are my Etsy stats* from the past week.

Week 1: 57 sales, (forgot to log my # of hearts)
Week 2: 60 sales, 812 hearts
Week 3: 68 sales, 894 hearts
Week 4: 71 sales, 928 hearts
Week 5: 79 sales, 1004 hearts
Week 6: 96 sales, 1045 hearts
*Note: these are my total stats (i.e. 96 total sales, not 96 sales this week, I wish!)

I didn't really do anything different this week than I've been doing in weeks past. Re-listing, putting in some Etsy forum time, got a few blog mentions. I did email my mailing list but that doesn't seem to have  had an immediate effect. I always forget to ask buyers how they found me. That would be very useful info to have in terms of making a decision about which efforts are paying off.  I'm getting very close to my 100 sale goal. By the time next week's update rolls around I think I will have met it

Holiday Shop Open

My shop is now fully stocked with gift wrap in red, green, orange, pink, blue and gift tags and cards to match. Also listed are some gift wrap sets of tags, ribbon and wrap and a make your own set option where you pick the wrap and tags that you want. Check it out!

Fabric Deisgn School

Kim at True Up is starting a series on how to design fabric for a living. The first installment today is an interview with a student at the California School of Professional Fabric Design. Read here.

Two things:
#1: Why have I never heard of this school?
#2: Why does everything cool happen in California (or NY or Portland)?