My first art fair is coming up. I’ve been thinking, breathing, planning this event for some time now, and one thing that was really bothering me was that I’d have to point all my future customers to my etsy store. And that means they’ll think “etsy” and not “Wordsremember”. So since our house sold (and my budget loosened up a bit) I decided to re-open my store through Shopify and give it a design face-lift.
I say design. I used the existing “Minimal” theme and kept making adjustments til I was happy with it-so I did design it, but not from scratch. I don’t want to give a false impression of my skills here;)
I also went ahead and bought a domain from Shopify: thewordsrememberboutique.com. It looked more professional than having the myshopify.com and I have plans to expand beyond wall art so it fits my continuing dream (something for everybody!!! I don’t have enough time /sob). I only have the basic plan (I haven’t actually sold anything from that store so I’m keeping costs low as I continue improving/adding products) and an app that provides the popup email subscriber thingy (I use MailChimp) so my total monthly cost is right around $36 (if I factor in cost of the domain). I haven’t done any advertising beyond utilizing my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts.
I’ve also been using Canva quite a bit-sometimes I’ll buy a design but more often I simply use one of the free backgrounds and combine my photos with “my” script (Pinyon). I’m so very pleased with how they’ve turned out.
I’m steadily adding products. I’d say 5-10/day but sometimes I find I need to retake photos which leads to redoing my etsy and amazon listings so sometimes it’s waaaaay less than that. I think I’m up to 110 products or so right now. I did transfer over my etsy listings but I’ve found that I title everything so differently it’s easier just to create new listings.
I’ve also been fiddling with navigation (drop down menus!) and how I organize everything. Being on etsy for so long is coming in handy-I have a much better vision for what I want my store to be and how I want it to visually impact buyers. I’m also consistently fiddling with my About pages and the call to action on the front page (currently it’s “Find the Perfect Gift”); that kind of marketing isn’t my strong suit so I suspect I’ll continue to fiddle.
In the future I’ll add some paid advertising, both through Facebook and also Google Ads. I don’t think I have enough product to justify that expense yet, but I have some ideas for adding on unique yet easily reproducible items (because we are only one person here;).
And while I did say this was a DIY post, I don’t have a list for you, because I didn’t follow a list. I did the free trial thing first, had no clue what I was doing, revamped my etsy store, tried Shopify again but I didn’t have the budget to keep it open, revamped my etsy store again and improved pictures, and now I feel like I have a clue. And I’ll go from there. So basically jump in whichever way feels best to you (as long as you do jump in).
Happy Monday, my friends. Always Art On.
Wordsremember 