What is your favourite item in your shop?
My favorite item in our shop right now is the “Safari Giraffe Growth Chart.” This is also one of the most popular designs and the fine art print and canvas wall art Giraffe sells well too!
What is your best seller?
Our best sellers are the Safari Animals Collection, Butterflies with Flowers Collection, and the Transportation Collection. We make our collections in 3’s…so people tend to buy all three designs in a collection for their children’s rooms.
What is your goal for 2010? And are you on the right track?
Our goal for 2010 is to have 10 total collections available for purchase. I think we can make it to nine of those! It is important to have a variety of art for our shop…so people can have lots to choose from. Since it takes my mother 2 months to make a collection, it’s not as fast as other handmade sellers.
What is your favourite tool that you cannot live without?
We just bought a grommet machine for our growth charts…that we cannot live without!
How do you promote your shop?
Facebook, Twitter, my blog, being active in the Etsy forums, and word of mouth!
Any advice for others running their on-line shop?
Communication, fast shipping, and good photos are key! Since you are not in front of the customer to sell your work, these things have to be a priority!
Saving money is important, tell us one thing that you do to save money?
We do all of our own shipping, we buy shipping supplies only when needed, and we’ve negotiate good prices with our vendors!
Any tutorial that you’d like to share, pretty please?
Take quality photos of your work in natural light, then edit them in Picasa, a free software program that you can download to your computer. Use the lightening, highlighting, and shadow features to tweak the photos for the best possible photo.
