Crafting in Today’s Economy: Don’t Lower Your Prices!

So you’ve thought about new things to make to ramp up for the holidays from yesterday’s post.

Now what do you do with the staples in your store? The bread and butter that just isn’t moving right now? You need to hold tight during slow sales months and I can tell you what NOT to do…

2. DON’T lower your prices! Our knee-jerk reaction in a “slow” economy is to lower prices. However, resist this urge…hold steady on your prices. It’s really hard to raise them again. And, if you lower them, it says you don’t value your workmanship or your time.

In some cases, some of the shops I have looked at, prices are way too low to begin with. These are handmade products. You have to get paid for your time, people, or you’ll never be able to stay in business. It took me a long time to learn this lesson (and hence, why I’m crafting part-time while working full-time). If you can, to make some extra money, sell supplies. I sell fabric on eBay along with my albums. It gets those customers in to take a look, and you make some money in the process on treasures you have lying around.

Really need to move inventory? Have sales or offer discounts to returning customers. But if your core prices are working for you, don’t change them. And if you feel they are too low, now’s the time to raise them so your customers will be used to the new numbers come holiday season. And if you really want to lure customers in with low prices, come up with some cute, quick items that will offer the inviting opening price, while still keeping your core products at sane price levels.

If you’re not sure if it’s the pricing that’s giving you trouble, try diving into #3 here while waiting out the slow season!

3. Refresh your stores, whether a website, an Etsy store, an eBay store or wherever you sell…now’s the time, when you have a little time, to add new photos, change up descriptions that aren’t working for you, revamp tags and material listings. If you have the same old, same old in your store month after month, it gets stale, and your valued followers could get bored and stop coming by, and then–their loss, they’ll miss your cool new intros when you roll those out.

Look at other websites, other stores, other listings. What do you like about those? What draws your attention? What makes you want to click that button to put those items into your cart. And then, without copying of course, try some strategies that seem to work for others. They may not always work for you, but keep testing. Eventually you’ll come up with the perfect formula for your products and your store!

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I Created This Easy Custom WordPress Header!

So yesterday, I decided it was time to get this blog rolling but I didn’t want to use just the regular headers that were available from wordpress. Not that they aren’t great, they are. And wordpress makes this process so turnkey, it’s amazing. But when I was tooling around the designs, I realized that some of the headers could be customized, so I decided to play a bit. And I was pretty proud of what I came up with considering the graphics tools I have to work with. It may not be perfect, but it is definitely more branded to me than what else was available.

I was so impressed with myself, I went ahead and redid my etsy store header too. You can check that one out here: irisandlily.etsy.com.

The neat thing here is how I made my header. It was really easy. I used images I had, Microsoft office Powerpoint (believe it or not…it’s a decent graphics tool in a pinch) and Snagit to capture my header, resize it and turn it into a jpg. You can find out more about Snagit here. I think they even give you a free two-week trial.

WordPress gives you the size you need (size varies depending on the design you choose) for your header image. For Etsy it’s 760 x 100 pixels, and here’s what you do. I had logo image already and some pretty graphics from an old site I used to have, plus a picture of one of the albums that I make. On a blank slide, I created a box in powerpoint and inserted the images, moving them around until I had them the way I wanted them. (Not that they are so awesome….but believe me, graphic design is way out of my league). The trickiest part was getting the little images to sit in front of the bigger images….here’s how you do that on Powerpoint. In the bottom left corner of the tool palette there is a DRAW function. Click on that and the top selection is Order. Click on that and it gives you the “Move to Back,” Move to Front commands. It only took me like 3 months to figure that out. 🙂

When I had this the way I wanted, I used Snagit to take a screen capture of just the part I wanted to turn into a header, resized and cropped it in that program and voila…..turned it into a header image that fit perfectly. So fun.

If you don’t have a logo, Powerpoint has a WordArt program that gives you the capability to turn plain words into…well, art. You can create a logo there too. I did that for an eBay store I had for a little while, see….. I created the logo with wordart, added the little bee guy (isn’t he cute?) and turned it into a jpg. Easy. I think you might be able to even do this in word too.

There are lots of you sellers on eBay who have opened stores. Even if you use eBay’s templates for your store design, you can really make your store your own with a simple logo like this, created with tools almost everyone has on their computers.

So on this blog, I’ll be talking about some of the ways I’ve sold my crafts online, even though I’m kinda a non-techy type. What’s so amazing about selling online is all the cool things you get to learn and have fun with. I’m off to Facebook next to create a page. I’ll let you know how that goes. If you’re a Facebook fan, watch for my IrisandLily page, coming soon!!

If you stumble across this post and you are wondering who the heck I am, check out my About page…. my craft is bookbinding.

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