Hacking and Nonsense
I’m not sure how I neglected to mention this before… Tinysaur is now cheap viagra available for sale at ThinkGeek!
They’ve got the T-Rex and Triceratops, hooray! So if you want a Tinysaur but also needed to pick up some Star Trek Interactive Tribbles, you can now get all your geeky geeky toys in one place. Hooray!
PS just because I like you: Free FedEx Home Delivery @ ThinkGeek. Use code: DEALNEWS
First thing’s first: if you haven’t already, vote for Tinysaur in the Craftiest Bastard Contest. If you live in the DC metro area, come by the show on Saturday, October 3 (eek, that’s tomorrow!). The show is in Adams Morgan, details can be found on the Crafty Bastards webste.
I’m excited because I’ve got some new items for this show… stuff which isn’t even available in my online shops yet! It’s been in the works for a while, and I’m proud to present you with:
Tinysaurs Under Glass
The glass bell jars are hand blown by Kiva Ford. They look way better in real life than in the snapshot I took earlier. Turns out glass domes are sort of tricky to photograph. I’ve made them for T-Rex, Triceratops, Woolly Mammoth, and the Butterfly. Sorry, no love for Stegosaurus. he’s just a wee bit too long.
Due to the inordinate number of things that could go wrong in shipping (well OK just one: breaking) I probably won’t be selling these online soon. Unless I can come up with a way of packaging I feel is secure enough. So you’ll just have to come to the show to see them.
This time of year I’m ordering a lot of supplies for Tinysaur. Over the next few days I have no less than 7 shipments of tins, bottles, tweezers, and paper headed my way. Yesterday’s shipment, a single order, consisted of 5 boxes weight over 100 pounds total. Oh yes, the UPS man knows where I am.
The latest website in my arsenal of organizational tools is TrackThePack.com. You register for an account, enter your various tracking numbers, and it shows them all on one page. More than that, it shows you the estimated arrival dates and even a tiny map of the package’s progress. It can handle tracking numbers from all the major US carriers, which is awesome.
Now to wait for my packages. Hooray?
Currently all my retail Tinysaur stuff is sold through Etsy.com. But lately I’ve been checking out some new venues, as Etsy’s toolset falls a little short for the volume of sales I do, and I feel like they’ve neglected the grassroots marketing aspect of the site. So I set out in search of someone who is doing the whole handmade market thing … better.
I regret to report that my first interaction with one of the alternative online markets has been somewhat unpleasant. I’ll refrain from naming them because I don’t want to make a bad situation worse, or call them out publicly, but I’ve got to vent.
I recieved an inter-site message from another member. It was a request for samples, to be sent to an unnamed list of people in New York. There was no explanation of who the person was, what organization they were with, etc. And they were asking for $400 worth of merchandise… free. In short, it sounded like a total scam. And I hardly have the time or resources to send that much merch off into a black hole. I declined, but offered wholesale pricing on the items. In the end they decided to purchase a smaller number at retail.
Edit: Turns out they needed me to ship before payment. It boggles my mind a bit that any vendor would be down with that. We ended up cancelling the order.
In a subsequent message I was informed that I was breaking a rule by offering kits on the site, as only finished goods are allowed. I’m sure this is an effort to get around the supplies situation that has overrun Etsy in some ways, but my kits aren’t a craft supply, they’re a finished good you assemble yourself.
Regardless, I’d like to comply with all of a site’s rules, so I pulled up the Terms of Service and read through the various associated documents. Nothing. I search all of the email messages I received during sign up. Nothing.
After a few back and forth messages with the user (who may be a site admin, given her pronoun usage, but I can’t find any mention of that anywhere on her profile, etc) it turns out that the “strictly enforced” rule can be found in a forum post. And is not, as far as I can tell, referenced anywhere in the Terms of Service or Merchant Rules.
It was a frustrating first interaction with the site; to be solicited for free stuff and then scolded (granted rather lightly) for not following rules you can’t find.
So now I’m sort of on the fence. On the one hand I really like some of the community based tools the site offers, and it’s not a hideously obvious Etsy clone like some sites, but the whole interaction left a bad taste in my mouth.
I’m slowly purging all references to my Etsy shop from my business cards, ads, etc because I want more control over by branding. Although I don’t have any short term plans to set up my own shopping cart I want to be a little more prepared if I do decide to.
I’ve set up http://shop.everythingtiny.com as a redirect to http://kfarrell.etsy.com and thought while I was at it I would write up instructions for how other folks can to – and on the super cheap. I’ve seen a bunch of places that charge a monthly or annual fee for domain forwarding. The cost of my setup is about $10/year including domain registration.
Tools You’ll Need
If you don’t already own a domain you can buy one through NearlyFreeSpeech.Net. It’s a little less than $9/year for domain registration and unlike GoDaddy they won’t spam you into getting a zillion of their other service. Deposit $10 into your NFSN account, purchase your domain name (it pulls from your account balance), and you’re good to go.
If you already have a domain name there will be a little extra configuration for you, but we’ll get to that later.
Setting up your site
Ok, there is a tiny cost to setting up the forwarding. While NFSN doesn’t charge any monthly fees for sites, they charge for storage (how big your site is) and bandwidth (how many gigabites of files your site sends to other people). Since you’re just forwarding your visitors on to Etsy, both of these will be very very low. Extermely low. But nonetheless you’ll need to make a small deposit into your NFSN account, $1 should be plenty.
Creating your .htaccess file
A .htaccess file is a special file that tells the server how to handle requests for your site. Open up a new file in your text editor and copy/paste the following:
RedirectTemp / http://yourshop.etsy.com/
Save the file to your hard drive with the name “.htaccess”, making sure there is no file extension such as .txt.
Upload the File to Your Site
Open up your FTP client and connect to your site (the connection information can be found by logging into NFSN and clicking the ‘sites’ tab and then the name of your site.
When you connect you’ll likely see a number of folders such as “logs” “private” and “public”. Upload your .htaccess file into the public folder. If it has a file extension rename the file so it is just “.htaccess”
Add Your Domain as an Alias
To make your domain work with your site you need to add it as an alias. Go to the site information page and click “Add a New Alias” on the right. Enter the domain you wish to use. I.e. if you want “http://shop.everythingtiny.com” to go to your Etsy shop enter “shop.everythingtiny.com”.
If you purchased your domain name through NFSN you’re done! It may take 24 hours for everything to start working, so be patient if it doesn’t seem to be doing anything right away. You can test to see if your redirect is working by going to http://yoursite.nfshost.com, where yoursite is the name of the site you created.
If you purchased your domain elsewhere
You’ll need to add a record to your DNS to get things working. Check your registrar’s documentation for “how to add a DNS record.” Once you’ve figured it out, you’ll want to add what’s called a CNAME record. It will look something like:
shop CNAME yoursite.nfshost.com.
Where “shop” is the subdomain you want to use (i.e. shop.everythingtiny.com) and yoursite is the name of your site at NFSN. The CNAME record may take a few hours to take effect.
Tada!
There are some photo mistakes I see over and over and over on Etsy. The good news is they’re easy to fix, and can make a huge difference in your photos.
One thing you do need is a decent camera. I have both a digital SLR (a Canon Rebel XT) and a point and shoot (Canon SD1100, now defunct, try the 1200 which is the updated version of my camera), and to tell you the truth I use the point and shoot for 90% of my product photos because it’s handy and takes fantastic photos. I’m a big fan of Canon cameras, but any camera which will let you turn off the flash and has a macro mode (for smaller items) is perfectly fine.
As a side note, a big thank you to all the sellers who were gracious enough to let me nitpick at their photos for the purpose of this article. Visit their shops when you’re done reading!
Just say no to heavy shadows
Dark shadows around your items are no one’s friend. They can make the photograph look cluttered and detract from the item itself, sometimes making it difficult to see properly. Moondogfarm has picked a great background for her necklace, but the shadow behind the pendant makes the photo feel uneven.
The trick to avoiding hard shadow lines is to diffuse the light hitting it. If you’re taking photos inside try shining your lights through a thin sheet of white tissue paper, or bouncing the light off a white card instead of aiming it directly at the object. If you take outdoor photos try to take your photos early in the day or later towards the evening rather than in the afternoon when the sun is directly overhead. A slightly overcast or cloudy day can be a great day to photograph.
Beware the crop
Almost every online marketplace will resize or crop your photos in some way. Make sure you take this into consideration with your photos! This can be especially difficult with larger items.
Bytheway‘s vintage maternity dress features some nice details in the sleeve and collar, but unfortunately Etsy’s center crop means all we see is a navy blue stomach and part of an arm. But as sellers, we don’t have any control over that, so we need to do our own cropping before we upload. By trimming off the bottom of the original photo the crop is pushed up, including the collar and sleeve. You can (and should!) still use the second through fifth images to show the whole item.
Cropping the image just below the chest changes the aspect ratio of the photo and gives us a much more favorable crop (shown right). Just be careful you don’t cut it too short or you’ll start to lose some of the sides of the photo.
A lot of sellers choose to chop off their model’s heads in photos. Showing your full model (head included) in a photo can be helpful for buyers to get a feel for how the item drapes and falls, and your model’s head buys you some space above the shirt/dress. So when the image is center-cropped you’ll still be able to see the collar and shoulders of the item. Confused? Check out TheVelvetVixen’s photos: here’s the original in the listing, and here’s the cropped version.
Avoid busy backgrounds
KnotOriginal has clearly put some time into her staging, and her photos are interesting and engaging as a result. She has a beautiful scarf on the left, and a mannequin to display it on… but it’s lost in the complicated background. The horizontal lines of the railing and vertical lines of the ships’ masts draw the eye away from the scarf. Busy backgrounds compete with your item for attention. You want people to see your item, not where you took it.
But that doesn’t mean you’re doomed to a life of white backgrounds. In fact white backgrounds are best avoided. They can be hard to photograph because they throw off your camera’s metering, and generally aren’t very interesting. Look at the photo on the right (also by KnotOriginal). The leaves in the background add texture without taking away from the item, and the contrasting color help it stand out.
Don’t let your edges show
If your background is a flat surface or plane, such as a table top or floor, take care not to let your edges show. Like a busy background it can detract from the item, drawing the eye away. The example on the left by andtherainfell is pretty mild – just a corner of a the window peeking in – but it’s still best avoided. And I’ve seen some really painful examples of this browsing Etsy.
Try changing your angle or crop to get rid of any unsightly edges. If you don’t have the luxury of a huge surface, or have larger items to photograph, work with your edges instead of against them. Try propping an item up against the wall, or bring other objects to serve as a backdrop and create visual interest. Just don’t let it get too busy. Using a shallow depth of field can also soften changes in your background, like domestikate’s photo on the right.
Unbalanced White Balance
Do your natural light photos have a bluish tint to them? You may want to check your camera’s white balance setting. Most digital cameras have settings for daylight, tungsten (incandescent lights) and fluorescent lighting. Select the option that best fits where you’re taking your photos. If possible, shoot your photos in RAW format, this saves the raw data without assigning a white balance profile to it. Instead you’ll select the appropriate lighting option when you convert the photos on your computer. Check the software which came with your camera or use a program like Photoshop to manipulate RAW files.
If your camera doesn’t support changing the white balance, you don’t want to mess around with RAW files, or you’ve already taken your photos, you can still tweak the levels a little bit in a photo editor such as Gimp (free) or Photoshop (not so free). On the right we have the same photo, but after using Photoshop’s “auto color” option. Note that “auto color” won’t work well on all photos, particularly ones without a lot of contrast. If you aren’t happy with “auto color,” hit undo and go to Image > Adjustments > Color Balance. Move the top and bottom sliders slightly away from cyan and blue to warm up your image.
Pass up the white background
On the subject of white… sometimes a white background is best avoided all together. White backgrounds can be extremely tricky because they cause your camera to think the scene is lighter than it is, which can result in an underexposed photo. It also accentuates any unevenness or “hot spots” in your lighting. Post-processing with programs like Photoshop make things a little easier, but even then it can be hard to get an image that has natural looking shadows and edges.
Colored backgrounds tend to be much more forgiving. Linen fabric makes a good backdrop, or lightly patterned cotton. Stay away from velvet unless you really know what you’re doing – it’ll look cheap if you don’t. And for heavens sake iron your fabrics before you photograph on them, everyone can tell when you just chucked an item onto the bed to photograph it.
Practice Makes Perfect
Taking good product photos is an iterative process. You just have to do it a lot to get good at it. Reading photography articles is great, but at the end of the day you just have to sit down and try a bunch of different things to see what works for you. Try not to get discouraged, it’ll come slowly but surely.
edit: thanks everyone who submitted photos, the post is now up here!
I want to write an article on how to improve your photos, but I feel like it would be a little self serving to just throw up pictures of my own work, take better photographs, and tell you how great I am now.
So if you’re an Etsy seller (or any other online marketplace) drop me a comment with a link to your shop, and I will tell you what sucks about your photos, but in a constructive way! Because I’ll tell you how to fix it too. This is my way of appearing philanthropic while actually just telling other people what to do.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, “But Kellbot, your shop photos look incredibly mediocre. Why should we listen to anything you say?” And before pointing out that Roger Ebert hasn’t made any good films lately, I will show you proof that at one point, when I was less lazy, I did in fact take good photos of my work:
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Now, I was in art school at the time, so I went for the Official Art School Gradient Effect. I suggest you avoid this in your product photos unless you are in fact selling high end art. Frankly it just looks silly on Amy Butler fabric purses.
So leave a comment with a link to your shop, or email me at kellbot@gmail.com if you’re shy. C’mon, send me your bad photos! I promise I won’t be too mean to them.
Every now and then I peek into the Etsy forums to gather information. It’s a good place to crowdsource… tons of people killing time on the internet who LOVE to share their opinion with you.
Invariably I see a thread asking about what the secret is to sell on Etsy, how people get so many sales, how much to relist in a day, etc. And I think I am fully qualified to answer these questions. I have an active Etsy shop, generally selling multiple items per day. I also used to work at Etsy, so I have an inside view of how the whole system works.
It turns out the secret to selling on Etsy is the same as selling anywhere: hard work and good products.
Ok, maybe that’s not the most helpful answer. So allow me to elaborate with a list of tips.
Do an Etsy search for your product. If you make bibs, search “bibs.” How many of the search results are the same as what you make? What makes yours different? It’s going to have to be something. Better photos, better prices, better selection, better construction, different style, whatever. But it’s got to be something or you’ll just be lost with the other 20,000 search results.
Pick a common theme and run with it. Make pouches in different shapes. Now you’re “that girl who makes round pouches,” and that already sets you apart from other people. Or maybe all of your fabric features skulls on it. Or flowers. Or math equations. Or your pouches all come with built in flashlights. Whatever. Transform yourself to “that person who makes generic” to “that person who makes specific.” You’ll stick in customers’ minds better, be easier to find, and sell more.
A few years ago I had a line of jewelry that I liked, my friend liked, it went well together without being boring… and it didn’t sell. Anywhere. And for whatever reason I just kept trying to sell it other places instead of moving on or changing it. Needless to say it didn’t work, and I’ve still got a ton of stock for it lying around on a shelf. If you really want to sell, at some point you have to evaluate what you’re doing and change if it’s not working.
Those are the big secrets. As far as relisting and other nonsense… I relist whenever things sell out, which is once a day or so. By selling something unique I find that even days later I’m still on the front page of search results
There’s also a lot of chatter about twittering/blogging, and whether those are good at driving sales. Yes and no. If you have something interesting to say, eventually people will read it, and if you’ve got your products showcased next to what you’re saying then it’s free advertising. But starting a blog and just posting when you list a new item isn’t interesting to anyone except you.
But it all comes back to your products. You can blog, twitter, and photograph all you want but it isn’t going to do a damned thing if you’re not selling an interesting product at the right price. So get off the Etsy forums and take a hard look at your products. Then fix them and try again.
Today was spent filling out forms, paying fees, and otherwise transforming Everything Tiny from a fly-by-night sole proprietorship to a legitimate LLC. I’ve waited until this long for a couple reasons…. for one I’m moving to New Jersey on Sunday, and it seemed stupid to set everything up in New York just to have to move it all in a few months. Secondly I wasn’t really sure if the whole thing was going to work, and didn’t want to fork over a ton of time/energy just to have to cancel it all next month. But after processing another wholesale order I figured it was time.
Here’s what I did:
Professional Printing
Up until now I’ve been printing my own packaging. When your packaging design changes every week, it just doesn’t make sense to have hundreds professionally printed. But I’ve finally got something I plan on sticking with for a while, so I went and ordered some nice glossy pre-cut matchbook covers (for the basic Tinysaurs) from overnightprints.com. I’ve heard mixed reviews for them – it sounds like if you use them long enough they’re bound to screw up irreparably – but I’m chancing it for now.
Federal Employee ID Number
I don’t have any employees now, but if things keep going they way they have been (fingers crossed) I’m going to need at least a part-time employee soon. So I went and got myself a FEIN. It took all of 5 minutes on the IRS website.
New Jersey LLC Registration
I’m now an official LLC, and can get a business checking account! The LLC forms were a little more in-depth than the IRS forms, and a little harder to fill out. I think the hardest part was figuring out what industry I’m in. Manufacturing? Arts and entertainment? Retail? Since my plan for this year is to do mostly wholesale and not retail, I went with manufacturing. There were some sub-codes for independent artisans, so I went with that.
UPC Codes
I plan on selling my stuff at some medium-sized retailers, some of whom use barcode scanners with their checkout. To get my stuff to work with their systems I need UPC barcodes on all my stuff, and each one has to be unique per product. I did a whole bunch of research… it’s expensive! You can register with GS1, but it ends up being abour $1000 to start, and then an extra few hundred dollars a year. I’m sure to a major manufacturer that’s nothing, but to me it’s pretty steep, so I decided to purchase barcodes for a reseller for the time being.
There are some drawbacks to purchasing from a reseller. First off, they’re not really your barcodes. They’re someone else’s barcodes, with someone else’s prefix, and they’ve been sold to you. For smaller retailers this isn’t a big deal. If you’re planning to sell your stuff to Wal-Mart or Target, this may cause problems. You also have to do research on your reseller – there was a change in GS1’s policies and only companies who registered with GS1 before August 2002 can resell UPCs. It’s really hard to find objective information because of course all the people providing it want you to buy from them.
Business Cards
So far business cards have been sort of an afterthought. Usually the night before a show I’ll think “Oh shoot, business cards!” and run some off on my home printer. I finally got my act together and had some printed up not only for me but also for my sales rep, Katherine (that’s right, I have a sales rep. You’re jealous).
Overall it was a busy day. I gave my business debit card quite a workout, and my books probably will look a little sadder this month than I thought, but most of it is one-time expenses I won’t have to worry about ever again. I rewarded myself with a bike ride through Liberty State Park with Chris, and we found that the Liberty Science Center is only a 5 minute bike ride away from home! This means we can go see films in IMAX and planetarium shows whenever we want. Now Chris is cooking dinner, I’d say it was a pretty good day.
Wholesale accounts are great. You move a ton of product with minimal effort compared to retail sales, and if things go well you’ll have a nice steady stream of repeat business. When I first started wholesaling I realized I was going to need a better way of keeping track of orders and payments than just my Paypal account. A spreadsheet will do you allright, but can be a bit of a chore to maintain.
I own a copy of Quickbooks, and actually know how to use it, but I haven’t set it up yet because it’s kind of a chore. And right now I’m working from any of three places, so having my invoicing tied to one machine is kind of a bummer.
Enter Freshbooks. Freshbooks is an online invoicing tool which makes things really easy. You enter your client info, put together an invoice, and send it via email or snailmail. If you send the invoice via email the client will get a link to a login page where they can view the invoice and, if you’ve set it up, pay it. I just got around to configuring mine to work with Paypal / Google Checkout.
It’s made my life a lot easier because I can see at a glance how much wholesale business I’ve done this month and which stores are purchasing the most. And I can track who has paid and who hasn’t easily. You can also get a report of which items are the bestsellers, although it’s a little clunky. But really the best thing about it is that it’s available from anywhere, so even if I’m traveling I can follow up on invoices.
Freshbooks also offers expense and time tracking which I haven’t used, currently I’m using Mint.com for expense tracking until I have the time to spend a morning setting up Quickbooks. You can also have additional accounts for staff members, which I don’t have. The free version lets you have up to 3 clients, after that plans start at $15/month.
Granted, Freshbooks doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do on your own with a little more time and energy, but both of those are a precious commodity for me. So being able to farm it out to someone else is a big plus. And I like that clients can log in and view their accounts at any time, see what’s due, etc. So far I’m happy with them. If you use something else to manage your wholesale clients, tell me about it in the comments!
