This morning, I woke up to check the email, I had Etsy consvo by my circle, I thought did I have the order? Anyway, it's not about treasure list, it's about where I got the felt supplier.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Take small step
I do agree Kelly Rae Robert in her book "Taking Flight", each day takes a small step, then take action, gathering those, it will become a big step. Today, I sent out 2 resumes applying part time bookkeeper, before sending those, it made me so fear about I'm not enough to handle the job, because I am new. Anyway, just give it a try.
This morning, I woke up to check the email, I had Etsy consvo by my circle, I thought did I have the order? Anyway, it's not about treasure list, it's about where I got the felt supplier.
This morning, I woke up to check the email, I had Etsy consvo by my circle, I thought did I have the order? Anyway, it's not about treasure list, it's about where I got the felt supplier.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Texture!
I am so excited about to edit photo by photoshop. Tonight, i've been by chance to read "Kelly's blog" and read Kim. It's so much fun.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
How to grow your shop without losing your mind!
I do like Tare Gentile talking about this matter, and i really do a kind of maker never thinking my prototype is perfect. Trying to show my prototype is good idea for selling and testing the water, we can't say that is not a good idea, nothing is impossible. I would like to share those article from Etsy.
What does it look like to grow an artisan or Etsy business today?
Good news: It’s not adding X number of new workers to the assembly line or going public just to cash out.
Today, the question of business growth is really about understanding where you want to take your business in terms of reach, depth, and revenue. Creating a plan to reach more customers, fulfill more of their desires, or generate more revenue means your business makes a bigger impact as it grows.
This is a delicate process for a business that values handmade, to be sure. But it can be done.
Whether you started your business as a hobby or full-time venture, it’s likely the scope you first imagined was relatively small. As you’ve learned more about what it takes to make your business successful, you’ve done more and more work to achieve this small scope. Not only are you the chief executive, you’re the VP of marketing, the creative director, and the worker on the factory floor.
You’re busy wearing so many hats that it’s daunting to imagine growing your business at all. How can you keep up? There’s an art to true growth — especially for artisan businesses. The art of growth is seeing how you can do more with less, separating your best work from busywork.
What if the key to growing your business was removing things from your to-do list instead of constantly adding to it?
Here are my strategies for getting started on the path to true growth. Your job is to take these ideas and make them your own.
The first step here is to identify which tasks could be systematized. Maybe you don’t need a system, but what if you’re not the one doing that task in six months? It’s easier to bring on a little extra help when the task has a system and clear expectations associated with it.
With that accomplished, you’ll be able to see roles where before there were none. If you choose to contract with a sales rep or hire a friend to tackle shipping, you’ll be ready.
Your team isn’t just the people around you. It’s all the tools and platforms you use to make your business function. Etsy, in fact, is a part of your team! What if instead of thinking of as Etsy as just a tool or just a place to sell your goods, you start thinking of it as a valuable member of your business team? When you think of your tools as team members, you can creatively “assign” them tasks you might not have thought of otherwise.
And that helps you get more of your best work done.
The simplest way to do this is to follow up with customers. No doubt, you’re already communicating with people who are buying. You’re answering their questions, updating them on shipments, and thanking them. Why not use that as an opportunity to ask, “How are you wearing your new scarf?” or “Where did you put your new wreath?” You can learn a lot about how to market your products in the future if you find out exactly how they’re being used right now.
You can also use blogs, email marketing, and social media to learn more about the feelings your product creates or who has your product on their birthday list. You can even use Etsy’s tools, like Circles, Favorites, and Convos, for this.
Bottom line: when you focus on quality feedback, your customers start to shape the way your products develop and your business grows. That means you can spend less time trying to get them to buy and more time packing up their eager orders.
If you have an idea for a brand-new spring collection, why not test a single product first? Create a sketch, a mockup, or a prototype that you can show to your best customers (see previous strategy!). Give them the chance to either swoon or provide constructive feedback. Then, iterate. Create a new version and try again.
Once you’ve got your best customers loving your prototype product, you start working on the rest of the collection. You can even sell early versions of your trial products at a discount in a special event sale (that creates excitement while keeping the value of the finished versions intact).
Having an incremental product development process means you spend more time creating the right products and less time wasting effort on marketing products that won’t sell.
No matter how you decide to approach it, the key to growing your business this year is to concentrate on the work that produces the best results and frees your creative mind.
Do you want to grow your Etsy business? How can you streamline your processes and make your workload more manageable? Share your thoughts in comments.
Tara Gentile is a business strategist for entrepreneurs who make a difference through commerce. She’s the author of The Art of Growth, a New Economy guide to maximizing your impact and minimizing your effort in business.
How to Grow Your Shop Without Losing Your Mind
What does it look like to grow an artisan or Etsy business today?
Good news: It’s not adding X number of new workers to the assembly line or going public just to cash out.
Today, the question of business growth is really about understanding where you want to take your business in terms of reach, depth, and revenue. Creating a plan to reach more customers, fulfill more of their desires, or generate more revenue means your business makes a bigger impact as it grows.
This is a delicate process for a business that values handmade, to be sure. But it can be done.
Whether you started your business as a hobby or full-time venture, it’s likely the scope you first imagined was relatively small. As you’ve learned more about what it takes to make your business successful, you’ve done more and more work to achieve this small scope. Not only are you the chief executive, you’re the VP of marketing, the creative director, and the worker on the factory floor.
You’re busy wearing so many hats that it’s daunting to imagine growing your business at all. How can you keep up? There’s an art to true growth — especially for artisan businesses. The art of growth is seeing how you can do more with less, separating your best work from busywork.
What if the key to growing your business was removing things from your to-do list instead of constantly adding to it?
Here are my strategies for getting started on the path to true growth. Your job is to take these ideas and make them your own.
1. Think About How Your Business Will Grow Beyond Your Team of One
You know that line, “No man is an island?” Well, no business is an island, either. Every successful business is a team of suppliers, contractors, employees, applications, and marketplaces all working together with the director of the business (that’s you). If you’re ready to grow your business, you must start envisioning the whole team as part of your success — not just me, myself, and I.The first step here is to identify which tasks could be systematized. Maybe you don’t need a system, but what if you’re not the one doing that task in six months? It’s easier to bring on a little extra help when the task has a system and clear expectations associated with it.
With that accomplished, you’ll be able to see roles where before there were none. If you choose to contract with a sales rep or hire a friend to tackle shipping, you’ll be ready.
Your team isn’t just the people around you. It’s all the tools and platforms you use to make your business function. Etsy, in fact, is a part of your team! What if instead of thinking of as Etsy as just a tool or just a place to sell your goods, you start thinking of it as a valuable member of your business team? When you think of your tools as team members, you can creatively “assign” them tasks you might not have thought of otherwise.
And that helps you get more of your best work done.
2. Create Feedback Loops
Feedback loops are ways you build customer communication into your sales cycle. Your goal is to know who is using your products, how they’re being used, how they make people feel, and who’s aspiring to purchase them.The simplest way to do this is to follow up with customers. No doubt, you’re already communicating with people who are buying. You’re answering their questions, updating them on shipments, and thanking them. Why not use that as an opportunity to ask, “How are you wearing your new scarf?” or “Where did you put your new wreath?” You can learn a lot about how to market your products in the future if you find out exactly how they’re being used right now.
You can also use blogs, email marketing, and social media to learn more about the feelings your product creates or who has your product on their birthday list. You can even use Etsy’s tools, like Circles, Favorites, and Convos, for this.
Bottom line: when you focus on quality feedback, your customers start to shape the way your products develop and your business grows. That means you can spend less time trying to get them to buy and more time packing up their eager orders.
3. Create New Products Incrementally
Entrepreneurs waste quite a bit of time perfecting products the public has never seen. Makers and creatives tend to be perfectionists. The devil is in the details, right?If you have an idea for a brand-new spring collection, why not test a single product first? Create a sketch, a mockup, or a prototype that you can show to your best customers (see previous strategy!). Give them the chance to either swoon or provide constructive feedback. Then, iterate. Create a new version and try again.
Once you’ve got your best customers loving your prototype product, you start working on the rest of the collection. You can even sell early versions of your trial products at a discount in a special event sale (that creates excitement while keeping the value of the finished versions intact).
Having an incremental product development process means you spend more time creating the right products and less time wasting effort on marketing products that won’t sell.
No matter how you decide to approach it, the key to growing your business this year is to concentrate on the work that produces the best results and frees your creative mind.
Do you want to grow your Etsy business? How can you streamline your processes and make your workload more manageable? Share your thoughts in comments.
Tara Gentile is a business strategist for entrepreneurs who make a difference through commerce. She’s the author of The Art of Growth, a New Economy guide to maximizing your impact and minimizing your effort in business.
Etsy Sucess
I am encourage trying to write my blog very often, sometime when i read very useful message or from Etsy or another blogger i hope i can share right here quickly. Just for remind me:
1. Create Your Etsy Goal
2. Set Major Milestones
Ready for Etsy Success? Start With an Etsy Goal
If you could actualize one really awesome goal for success in 2013, what would it be?
If you’re like many other creative thinkers and entrepreneurs, I’m going to guess that you have no shortage of ideas, but you need help creating a plan for accomplishing some of your biggest goals (a few more hours in the day wouldn’t hurt, either).
I’m in the same boat. Sometimes I feel like an idea machine without enough years in life to accomplish everything I want to do.
When I was 19 years old, I started a fanzine called Venus about women in music and DIY culture in my college dorm with a starting budget of $10. Fast-forward seven years, and I’d grown Venus into a glossy, internationally circulated magazine and website — all without a formal business plan. Instead, I used a “DIY business plan” that consisted of a series of goals and milestones, ranging from building an email database to full-color production to hiring staff to getting a real office space. Eventually, I had set and attained so many goals that I was able to sell the company to a larger publisher.
Without this process of setting incremental goals over a reasonable amount of time, I would have been completely overwhelmed by the idea of growing a scrappy fanzine into a legitimate business overnight. Over the years, I’ve refined goal-setting into the following three-part system to help creative small businesses.
Ready to get started?
1. Create Your Etsy Goal
Thinking Big and Visionary
Take a step back from the nitty-gritty details of the here and now and think about the big picture of what you really want for your Etsy shop.
For new sellers, your Etsy Goal might be to make 10 sales in the next three months. If you’re an experienced seller, you may want to become a top seller or quit your day job within the next three years. For advanced sellers, your Etsy Goal might be to become nationally known as an innovative designer. These are just a few examples of the kinds of Etsy Goals you could set for yourself.
Every Etsy Goal is unique to the seller. In the words of Lucy Berkley ofberkleyillustration in this Quit Your Day Job feature, “You have to find your own path. There isn’t an exact formula for success.”
The same goes for time frames. Depending on the scope of your Etsy Goal, you may need, say, six months, a year, or several years to accomplish your goal. What’s reasonable and doable for you? One of the most important aspects of your Etsy Goal is to create a goal that will keep you motivated, inspired, and moving toward completion. Once you reach your goal, you’ll feel a deep sense of accomplishment, which will, in turn, inspire you to create a new Etsy Goal — and then another, and another. In a nutshell, this is how businesses grow.
Before we progress to the next two steps, visualize yourself having already achieved your goal. Then, ask yourself these questions: What does life look like now? How do I feel? How will this Etsy Goal benefit me? What hurdles did I jump to get here?
2. Set Major Milestones
Laying the Groundwork for Accomplishing Your Etsy Goal
Congratulations! You’ve created an Etsy Goal, and you’re going to feel on top of the world once you accomplish it. How are you going to get there?
To lay the groundwork for your Etsy Goal, setting major milestones are the next critical steps for getting the work done. Major milestones are the significant points in development. Major milestones aren’t a “to-do” list per se. Major milestones are the significant achievements that you accomplish along the way to the finish line of your Etsy Goal. I recommend developing a calendar of major milestones — a map could be over a six- or 12-month span or up to several years. Your time frame depends on the scope of your Etsy Goal.
Examples of Major Milestones
Let’s say your Etsy Goal is to earn enough income from your Etsy shop that you can quit your day job within two years. After you’ve done the math to figure out how much money you’ll need to earn to pay yourself a decent salary, you should develop a list of the major milestones that you want to achieve before leaving your job. Here’s an example of what these major milestones might look like in this scenario:
Let’s say your Etsy Goal is to earn enough income from your Etsy shop that you can quit your day job within two years. After you’ve done the math to figure out how much money you’ll need to earn to pay yourself a decent salary, you should develop a list of the major milestones that you want to achieve before leaving your job. Here’s an example of what these major milestones might look like in this scenario:
- Create a strategic marketing plan that includes social media, newsletters, and blog coverage
- Create a new line of products
- Double sales
- Research, select, and budget for a new health-insurance policy
- Save six months of living expenses for a “just in case fund”
3. Move Forward With Next Attainable Action Steps
Chunking Out the Work, One Month at a Time
Now that you’ve written your list of major milestones, you’re ready to break the work into Next Attainable Action Steps (NAAS) — an ambitious yet realistic set of to-do list items. NAAS are chewable, bite-size tasks that take you one step closer to accomplishing your major milestones. I recommend setting NAAS in monthly increments. Once you accomplish a month’s worth of NAAS, you’ll create the following month’s NAAS.
NAAS Criteria:
- Based on the amount of time and energy you have (not wish you had), set a month’s worth of clear and attainable steps toward accomplishing your major milestones.
- Be specific about numbers and quantities whenever possible. Without numbers, you’ll tend to be wishy-washy. Here are some examples:
Create one engaging Tweet every day.
By Friday, research how three similar Etsy shops are handling their marketing.
Set up an auto-draft with my bank so that I’m automatically putting $100 per month into my savings account.
- After writing your list of attainable next steps, briefly visualize yourself doing the tasks, and calculate the estimated hours to accomplish them. Add up the hours of all your NAAS. If the task hours exceed your available hours, trim the fat, and place leftovers on your NAAS list for the following month.
The Final Step: Make It Happen!
- Get the word out. Share your Etsy Goal with a supportive friend or fellow Etsy seller, write in your journal, create a poster or vision board, or post it in your blog. If you announce your Etsy Goal, you’re 100% more likely to actually accomplish it.
- Chunk out your NAAS into even smaller tasks, such as daily or weekly increments. Use calendar and to-do-list tools like Google Calendar, Evernote,TeuxDeux, etc.
- Connect with people who can help you. Share your ideas and questions with other Etsy sellers and people with common interests. Join an Etsy Team.
I’m excited to work with you this year on your Etsy Goal! Join this Etsy Success discussionto share your goals and major milestone for 2013, or share them in comments below.
Skating!
This year i'm going to sign up skating class for my little one, i can't believe she did quite well in her second time to skate. Here you go.
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