Pricing

I think one of my biggest challenges with selling on Etsy is charging the right price. It's easy enough when you're selling something that's easily priced at a reasonably price. I'm finding that pricing knitted or even sewn clothing is very difficult because if I'm going to price my items properly, I feel like no one would realistically pay that much. For example, I'll explain using the new Heirloom Crochet and Lace over Satin Christening Gown I'm finishing up right now.

Etsy suggests pricing items using this formula: 

Labor hours X pay (minimum $10 an hour) + Cost of materials X 2 = Price

So.. the dress takes me about 10 hours to complete. 10 hours X $10 = $100
Cost is about $20. 

$100 + $20 = $120 

$120 X 2 = $240


Problem is, I'm wondering why someone would buy a dress on Etsy for $240 when they can buy something similar at a local department store for less than half that. 

Here's why a lot of people do though: http://poppytalks101reasonstobuyhandmade.blogspot.com/

A few highlights from the list: 

5. support the artisan directly. the artisan needs more support for their vocation - more than most.
11. Handmade products are more than just a product. There is love, creativity and uniqueness. And that shows.
18. You are supporting local artisans and craftspeople and not large big box stores.
24. When you buy handmade you create a direct relationship with the artist or designer of the product.
26. It's great for the economy
47. Buying handmade is win-win situation : You enrich your life with beautiful handmade goods, and you enable an artist to continue following their creative dreams.
70. Sincerity. People don’t hand craft things just to make money. They’re not just the product of a slick R&D department for profit. They make things that involve years of learned skills, passion, enthusiasm, commitment and sincerity. 
71. Buying handmade shows our children that not everything in this world needs to be mass produced. It teaches them to love and appreciate the unique and the imperfect. And it inspires them to do their own creating as well. 
85. Embraces and celebrates the diversity of regional cultures, ideas, and resources from around the world. 
92. Because you are not just buying an item, you are buying a piece of the artist. You are supporting the love, sweat, tears, future, family, confidence, mind, body and soul of that person. It creates an amazing relationship between 2 people: the buyer and seller. You are not just a customer, you are a supporter, a fan, a collector of art.

100. Because somewhere out there in the world, you are providing additional financial support for stay at home moms, who have chosen to stay home to take care of their kids & provide personalized care & guidance for their children, who in turn will (hopefully) grow up to be better people who will have wonderful memories of their childhood with a parent.

So now you know how and why I price the way I do, even when other artisans sadly under price themselves! 

Sarah

Priorities

Weekends are prime working time for me. I have a day job as a full time nanny for two fabulous little girls so I tend to be too tired to get much done by the time I get home. Yesterday was a surprise day off for me, so I decided to spend the time building a website for SunflowerSeedStitch (this is going to seem kind of silly for those of you reading this off the website!).

After spending all day struggling to get my website up and running, I decided last night that I would work all the next day making my Minnie Mouse inspired Crochet Silky to model on Sophia. I have everything I need to do it and I've been so excited to use the gorgeous silky red polka dot fabric I bought from Vintage Jet Patterns on Etsy.

Fabric bought from Vintage Jet Patterns

Yet I woke up this morning and ended up going straight back to working on my website. Looking back, I feel like I hardly got anything done on it anyway! All I really accomplished was changing the background, making a new header image for the site and for the Facebook Page's cover image and messing with the CSS enough to get the pale pink box on each page of my website to be the right size. 

To think, I could have spent the day sewing. Ugh.

I guess that's what I'll do tomorrow! I was just hoping to have another new item to model on her by Monday. At least the weather will be bad Monday, so I won't be able to do the photos until Tuesday anyway.

She's the cutest dang model I think I've ever seen!

Here she's wearing the grey Shell Shrug which is a product to come out for Spring! 

Plus, she takes super cute photos! 

Wearing Ella's Ballerina Tutu Dress

Well, I guess I better get started on that Minnie Mouse dress!! Here's a quick sketch for your viewing pleasure: 

-Sarah

When problems arise...

For me, it's really hard to just go with the flow and roll with the punches.
Last night was one of those nights that made me want to throw my sewing machine and everything else on my work desk out the window. The first thing to go wrong was the fact that I was up way too late (which is never a good thing for my mood) and my iron on labels wouldn't iron on. Helpful, right?
On my third attempt - and third label - I decided to give up and just sew the dang thing on.... With no luck. When I tried sewing it onto the new crochet shrug I'm sending to Lola Sam Photography, my sewing machine jammed. In retrospect, that should have been sign enough to stop. The problems just kept arising.
Tonight, after a full day at my regular job, I began trying to remember how to make my sewing machine do buttonholes. Normally, this is a super simple thing to do... I mean, the thing is automatic, it does it for you completely! Not today though. Not when I need to ship something that needs button holes. No. It refuses.

So now, I'm surfing through Craigslist to find a new sewing machine... I'm in a fight with my current one.

It's winning.

The back of the new shrug! It's a really cute shell design. Great for spring and will be coming out in a lighter yarn for those of you in warmer locations!

Long day!

Sewing the skirt of the silky crochet dress!

I have a super long day ahead of me. I have so much to do in such a short time!!

Here's my to do list for the day:

Finish the latest crochet silky dress - which has a aqua blue crochet T-Shirt top, pink and grey silky flower print pleated skirt, bright yellow satin ribbon waist band and yellow silky flower on the hip. I still have to sew the skirt together, attach it to the bodice, attach the buttons and add button holes, crochet the sleeves and finish the seams.


Then I have to finish a grey crochet shrug I started, order more shipping boxes from USPS, update a bunch of listings (the whole SEO thing again!), edit photos and upload them onto listings with poor photos, AND if I can do it, make another sleeveless floral print upcycled dress.

The back of the Floral Print Upcycled Dress

I need to be shipping out these items to the photographer (Lola Sam Photography) by tomorrow afternoon if I want to get the images back in time to use them for Easter, so I'm in a rush!

 Wish me luck!!

Sarah

Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a hard concept for me to grasp. I'm not even sure if I really understand it completely, but it goes a little something like this:

You list your item on Etsy and add all the information for your customer to be ready to buy it. This includes search tags for Etsy to help the customer find your item in the first place! The thing is, Etsy doesn't straight up tell you that Google and other search engines like Bing or Yahoo! can't find your listing from your search tags. They find it based on keywords in your listing title and description. So, what that means is that if your title or description aren't using keywords strategically, the search engines won't find you. What THAT means, is that you're missing out on a huge market. While Etsy has gained quite a bit of popularity over the last few years, a lot of people out there still don't know what it is. This is where Search Engine Optimization comes in.

I've been doing a lot of reading on how to optimize my keywords for the engines to find my listings and tweaking each of my listings. This means re-writing a lot of what I've written to be more keyword friendly. To be keyword friendly, I have to be pretty repetitive and repeat the words 'crochet dress' over and over throughout the listing, along with all the other key phrases. When Google sees these key phrases showing up several times in the listing, they bump the link up higher in importance when listing links when people search for the specific keywords I have in my listing. So, for example if I only used the phrase 'crochet dress' in the title of my listing, and a customer searches "crochet dress" and is surfing through pages of links, my listing link will show up AFTER the link of a listing which says "crochet dress" 2 times, and so on.

So now I'm going through all of my listings and re-writing my titles and descriptions to be keyword rich and redoing my Etsy search tags to be found more in the Etsy searches as well.

Nothing like opening a handmade goods store only to spend half your time writing and doing administrative work on the computer!! :P

Good times.


Sarah

Very first post?

Hmm, what to say.

Well, I guess I'll just jump right into it!

Since I started my shop called SunflowerSeedStitch in August I've been struggling. I've learned a couple of things and the biggest of that is this:

Online retail isn't just about making a listing and letting the cash roll in. In fact, it's not even close. I've tested this method and let me tell you, it doesn't work.
Only in December did I really put myself into high gear and work hard at getting my shop going and by January I noticed a huge increase in views and sales and had doubled my sales and quadrupled my views!

In September I was working for a family friend babysitting a Window Installation booth at the local fair and (bored out of my mind) had been knitting to keep myself occupied. That day I had come up with this super cute skirt design with a knitted white ribbed waist band and a ruffled tutu skirt using a Pirouette Ruffle yarn from Patons. Here's the skirt with a hot pink ribbon tied around it:

This is really where it all started to pick up. I didn't know it yet, but I had stumbled on what my shop would be roughly based around that day.

I started busting out these skirts willy-nilly not stopping to think of what size I was making them, and only realizing I was making skirts big enough for five-years-olds with babies in mind for the intended recipient! Ha! Well once I figured that out, I started planning out properly with my gauge and getting the amount of stitches right for the right size.

In October I had the brilliant (and I mean Brilliant with a capital B) idea of turning this skirt into a Christmas themed Santa skirt: 

I know for a fact that this skirt would have been a game changer for my sales during the Holidays but I was too dopey to figure out that you can't just list items and expect people to be able to find it. One person did, and that was great, because she just so happened to be a professional photographer and owner of Lola Sam Photography.

Well this was going to turn out to be a big deal for me. I just didn't know it yet.

December came and went, and it was practically useless as far as a Christmas season goes... I had no sales. Huge bummer. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong and was so frustrated, but I'm the type of person who tends to push harder when I get frustrated instead of giving up. I'm a problem solver, and I HAD to know what I was doing wrong.

Then January hit. I knew I needed to bust my butt getting Valentines day stuff out as soon as possible and came up with this little gem, a cross between the skirt I had made back in September and a crochet dress:

I had 5 sales of this dress within a week and a half, more sales than I had gotten TOTAL in 4 months! I'm not sure exactly what I had done right with getting this dress found, but people seemed to be flocking to it. It was great! I even had some people ask for custom dresses like this in different colors. 

Now it's February and I'm working on getting some new products out. I'm in the design/create phase of a high-waisted, crochet bodice, silky printed fabric pleated skirt dress with a handmade silky flower attached at the waist. So far I have completed a pink top with blue butterflies, and a yellow with pink flowers 

 

My biggest focus right now is working on improving my search tags to improve my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which I know almost nothing about. I've been doing some tests with some of my listings and getting great results, so I think I know what I've been doing wrong. Instead of tagging "silk" "crochet" "dress" "easter" "baby" "clothing" I should have the tag be "silk crochet dress" and "easter baby clothing" 

I need to be more specific and think like the customer!! 

Well, that's what is going on right now! I have a new dress in the works that's just about done and read for listing, here's a sneak peek! 

See ya later!

Sarah