Jewelry Designer
by Rose Fresquez.
(Denver, Colorado USA)
Visibility of my Jewelry. I have a website now but having a chance for people to see it is been hard. I do well at craft shows but most shows being so expensive, it’s hard to keep my prices reasonable, yet raising them means losing buyers.
That’s been quite challenging.
Rose Fresquez
Comments:
Building your business
by: Leigh
Have you thought about collecting email addresses from those craft shows and events that you attend. You can then keep your interested prospects in the know with your new designs and pieces you have for sale.
You could use a service such as Mailchimp.com to run your “news”. They have a free account for those on a shoestring budget.
Thanks!
by: Anonymous
Thanks so much for your advice! I will check that out!
Improving your Visibility
by: Jehanni
One tip for improving your visibility I learned way back, but I think still works very well, is donating a piece for a cause you believe in. During my childhood, my mom worked in batik, and our local PBS station was WGBH CHannel 2 in Boston. They had an on-air art auction fundraiser every year, and she became quite well-known for her annual donations. It was pretty high profile to have the cameras focus on her piece, and broadcast to the Boston area!
I tried the technique myself last year when the Howard County Library in MD held a fundraiser. Now, those events are often high-tech: They wanted a .jpg of the piece to post on their auction website, and a link to my website as well as a verbal description the auctioneer, website visitors, and event attendees might read. You can often include a short “artist’s bio” paragraph about what inspires you.
The library donation is a tax write-off for me (not all benefit events qualify this way, but if they do, be sure to state the retail value of your work as if you had sold it instead of donating it). I get a chance to support a cause I believe in without spending a lot of cash (of course, my in-kind time making the piece is the real donation).
And it exposes my work to a different potential client base than craft shows, Etsy, and my website do. My librarian friend says the woman who won the piece at the auction still mentions how delighted she is 10 months later. That’s a win for me!
Use great images
by: Luann Udell
In addition to the excellent suggestions already given, you might try experimenting with your photography. think this would give your pieces the ‘pop’ they deserve! Check out Etsy sellers to see how they use close-ups (macro setting on a digital camera), soft lighting & light boxes to get great photos. You can get great results now with relatively inexpensive cameras, and even free photo retouching software (like Windows Live Photo and Picassa) can rework a so-so image into something pretty cool.)
Details ….
by: Delia
One thing I noticed on your site is that I couldn’t get a close up look at anything, which is very bad for sales. I tried to get an enlarged picture of the orange feather earrings because I wanted to see the detail… was it a carved feather, or a bead just sort of shaped like a feather? I couldn’t tell because when I clicked on the small picture it did not enlarge. Most people will no buy what they see. Photos are SO very important for internet sales of jewlery. The photo is what sales it and if the photo fall short, so do the sales.
Check your Meta Tags
by: CB
I took your web site title and did a search. You don’t show up in Google under your title just your URL. I would be sure to place your name Tonga Designs in the meta tags to be sure your customers can find you or be sure to tell them to put the entire URL in the search engine. I learned that the hard way when people were trying to find me and could not. I finally put my name in the meta tags and was surprised at the amount of traffic I received. 🙂
Jewelry designer
by: Yananta
This was not my question, but I love the responses. Somethings I will try… Thanks
Photos, photos, photos
by: Charlene
I think you really need to work on your photos. There are color cast issues you need to deal with. Check your white balance and lighting temperatures.
Also, spend some time looking at designers photos you like and direct what you like about them. Then put that into play with your own photos and develop your own style so that the photos are “you.”
Hope this helps!
Char
What exactly is your question?
by: Anonymous
What exactly is your question? I can’t really tell. Keeping prices low or visibility? 🙂
“Visibility of my Jewelry. I have a website now but having a chance for people to see it is been hard. I do well at craft shows but most shows being so expensive, it’s hard to keep my prices reasonable, yet raising them means losing buyers.”
Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy
by: The Glass Chef and Love That Leather
Believe it or not, I now use my IPhone 4S to take all of my jewelry photos and I don’t even use a tripod! This saves me tons of time and time is money. It takes fantastic pictures just by putting my jewelry near a window that doesn’t have direct sunlight and holding the camera as still as possible and snapping the photo. You can then crop it on the phone and your done! I have a mac computer so the photo is automatically sent to my computer via iCloud, I post it on Etsy and I’m done!
Best purchase ever. You will love it and I take more photos of everything than I ever have in my life because it is so easy and such great quality without having to make any adjustments to the camera whatsoever.
Thanks for the comments!
by: Rose
I apprecaite all your helpful comments. Thanks so much!
Photos & promote, promote
by: zoraida
I don’t know if selling online will ever be as profitable for most of us as live shows but I do try.
At shows, I hand out business cards like crazy and tell everyone about my online shops. I offer to create custom pieces. I have a guest book and collect emails. I send each one holiday greetings, offer a special discount or freebie to repeat customers.
I respond to every email even if they only want to know how to create a piece of jewelry or where to get free tutorials or cheap supplies.
I agree with Delia about taking superb photos (I’m always working on that) and you need to promote, promote and promote. Post on Facebook, social networks, twitter, blogs, enter contests, give a little something away, write a free tutorial.
If you haven’t tried all or some of these already, I hope this helps.
