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| October Special: orders over $150 get $7 off |
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October Update
We are preparing for the Season with lots of new jewelry designs that should show up in a week or so. We also have a new shipment of starlamps in the air, so look for new designs and restocks of our best sellers in about two weeks. Getting ready for the Holiday season brings me to another topic: marketing. I recently finished reading a great book on advertising that really has me fired up. It's called What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeed by Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart. Although the book is written mainly for larger companies with bigger ad budgets and multiple advertising methods, I think it has something to offer even for smaller businesses like mine and perhaps like yours. See below for a more in-depth review of the book. We are working on a revamp of our site. It's been a work in progress for the past six months, but we have moved to the layout stage (finally). Over the next month or so we will begin the migration to the new layout. This will involve using a new shopping cart, which I think will be a better fit for our needs. I'll keep you updated as things progress, but hopefully by next newsletter we will be live on the new site. Click here to see everything added since the last newsletter.
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Article:
Starting A Jewelry & Accessories Business Once you have decided what items to carry, decide how you will sell them: online, flea market, home parties, in coffee shops, brick and mortar storefront, etc. I have found that selling face to face in a casual environment can be very effective, especially as you are getting started. Home parties or doing "shows" at local venues like coffee shops or at craft fairs limits the amount of competition you face while making your products seem special and personal. Doing small venue retailing is also great because it creates a "no pressure" atmosphere, provides you freedom (it's usually only a few days a week), and gives you immediate feedback on what your customers like or don't like about your product. It's also a great way to find out more about your customers' preferences and what they are looking for (but not finding) in other retail establishments. Best of all, these smaller shows are very cost effective. Usually a "table-fee" is all that is required, and even that is often a nominal amount. We suggest tripling the price of everything you buy from indiasilver.com, but some items may allow for a higher margin. Look for comparable items at other retailers in your area and get a feel for price levels. This scouting will also give you some ideas for merchandising your products-- both what works and what doesn't work. As for selling online, this can be successful but it does require some technical expertise. Taking photos of jewelry is one of the most difficult assignments a professional photographer can face. There are many online solutions to help with this task, ranging from using items purchased at your local craft store to professional lightboxes costing thousands. For selling online, it is absolutely critical that you get nice photos of your products from several angles so your customer can see what they look like. You cannot count on them to fill in the blanks and just know that the pieces are nice. Have friends or family look at the photos you have taken with a pair of fresh eyes for feedback. Finding a way to convey a sense of scale is also of great importance. When we first started, we used really tight shots that showed every detail of a piece. This often misrepresented the product, since the enhanced detail led the customer to believe the product was larger than it truly was. Now we give detailed measurements and try to show each piece on a model, if possible. Equally daunting can be the prospect of getting traffic to your site. There are millions of sites and billions of pages all vying for eyeballs. How will a potential customer find your site? There are several ways to drive visitors to your online store. The easiest and (I think) least efficient way is to use Google Adwords or Yahoo Sponsored Search. Paying for visitors can cost thousands of dollars per month, and conversion from casual visitor to paying customer is a crapshoot. A better way to drive traffic to your site is by using the small venue retailing at coffee shops and craft fairs as a spring board. Hand out nice business cards and flyers with your website and email address on them. Chat your site up. Anytime you advertise, make sure to include your website address. Finally, register your site with directories that will link back to it. One of the top values in search engine algorithms is determined by number of quality links pointing to the site. There are lots of "link farms" out there that promise five links back to your site for each link pointing to theirs. These types of low-quality links can actually have a negative effect on your ranking. Sites will link back to you for several reasons. Index sites like searchpixie.com will list you if you complete a simple registration form. Other sites related to yours will link to you if they feel your site is valuable for one reason or another. Having lots of information, background story, history, and resources is usually the best way to get noticed and linked to. Blogs are also a great way to create buzz. One idea would be to blog your start up. Talking candidly about the successes and challenges of the process can be a very compelling story. The big search engines like Yahoo! and Google will find your site if there are links pointing back to it. Otherwise you will need to submit your URL to them via their standard procedure. It will take months for you to appear in their rankings. There is a whole science devoted to search engine marketing. A good primer can be found at searchenginewatch.com. There are also many sites and newsletters devoted entirely to ranking highly in organic search engine results. Along this same line, you can pay a company to do search engine optimization (SEO) for you. These SEO companies vary in quality and performance. Many make promises they cannot and do not deliver. Look for a guarantee to back up the hype. Money back guarantees are only good if they actually refund the money, so check references. There are lots of bait and switch deals out there, so buyer beware. My own experience has run the gamut of these sales channels. We started selling at coffee shops and to friends. We made a color catalog and website almost immediately, but I had a background in graphic design so the costs associated with doing this were minimal. Also, in 1996, the web was a much smaller place, so getting found was a lot easier. Retail on today's internet is a tough act. There is lots of competition and much of it is being done by deep pockets. We have had to adapt endlessly over the years, constantly improving product, website layout, website copy, marketing strategies and even changing target markets. In addition to our wholesale site we now have two brick and mortar retail stores. Venturing into retail has required a whole different set of skills and concepts. There is a big difference between having one or two employees and having ten. The best advice is to start simple, see how it goes, and adapt as necessary given the feedback you get from customers and from your bank account. Good luck. |
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Review:
What Sticks What Sticks takes a totally different approach. The authors worked with the top thirty advertisers in the US to determine what worked and what didn't in ad campaigns whose collective budgets totaled more than $1 billion. Their findings? Over $300 million of the budgets were wasted. What's more, their study breaks down exactly what went wrong and why. The book is intended for the audience it examines, mainly large companies with marketing departments and robust ad budgets, but I found many of the details to be pertinent to my own retail stores. One of the things the authors stress in the book is the need to constantly examine the effectiveness of different media channels. Although this sounds like a no-brainer, they show how often marketing departments fail to follow through and implement changes based on "what sticks." We recently did a "Design Day" promotion in our stores. We ran ads with a coupon that would allow the bearer to design and make a free bracelet in our store. The response was pretty good, but the real devil was in the details. Out of all the coupons I got in, all but two were from my email announcement. The ads I ran in two local newspapers cost $350 but produced only two customers! For me, the book has served as a kick in the pants to continuously evaluate my marketing strategies, and to look for new ways to reach out to customers in the most cost-effective fashion. What Sticks is not a light read, and much of it is geared toward companies that have much larger sales volumes than mine, but amongst the recommendations I found plenty that smaller business owners like myself can and should take advantage of. What sticks is available at Amazon at and at some of the larger book stores. Fall &
Winter Trends: Highlights of the Site Everything added since last newsletter New jewelry designs added New Arrivals section has all the latest and greatest. New chains have been added. Here's hoping you have a successful October. Aloha, Mike McGinnis |
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