Bee-Commerce

After the face-to-face fun of the market, I have also joined the crafty hordes on both Etsy.com and New Zealand’s version felt.co.nz

Kind of hedging my bets between the two, splitting my stock at the moment to see which reaches more people or generates traffic. There is no clear winner yet and I am liking/disliking things about both sites, but hey ... its all learning.

felt.co.nz/shop/intothewhite and http://www.etsy.com/shop/intothewhite

The hardest part is being heard above all the noise: there are so many clever people selling amazing things in both marketplaces, that is hard to be noticed. Guess it will come with time.

Once again, I have a few Xmas card sets left and I am trying to sell those (word of mouth) is working well, but I am also still pushing the non-Xmas cards, notebook sets and this print I did with wooden type brought back from England.

Started as a bit of a basic exercise, simply setting and overprinting the upper case and lower case letters ... but when I was locking up the black type I realised I was holding a lower case D, and not a B.

It stumped me for a few days, but then I made the plate of the bumble bee to fill the gap, and it works well I reckon. Really nice impression in the paper, its quite tactile how the wooden type prints.

Market Day

My wares set out, ready to hawk.

Finally did it - sold at a market, and it went bloody well. Weather turned out to be fine that day, and as it was election day in NZ, the venue at Berhampore School was also a polling station. So there was a bit of extra foot traffic

Must say I really enjoyed the day - it was actually very stress free compared to printing and binding everything madly over the past 10 days or so. Basically, I just chatted to other stall holders, drank coffee and chatted to customers.

All up, I think I sold about 50% of what I took to sell so it was more than worth it, but on top of the money it was a real-life focus group for designs, colours & products, and let me see what people will actually ‘go for’.

Keen for more. Will have to hurriedly print more stuff for the upcoming Xmas markets that remain in Wellington.

A selection of the cards  - Xmas and not.

New for Xmas 2011

We 3 Kingz: George, Elvis and Halie Selassie - King of Kings

 After avoiding printing in favour of the Rugby World Cup this year (and co-running the related blog over at ruggerblogger) I have finally gotten my A into G and did some printing. It seemed like I have hardly done anything in the last 12 months ... thought about it lot, designed a lot ... but printed nada. Not any more.

Printed a whole new set of Xmas cards for this year, including the ‘We 3 Kingz’ in red, gold & green design above, plus I have handmade a whole lot of small notebooks; brightly coloured with different cover designs.

Became a case of now or never -there is a Xmas craft market about 750 metres from my house, and if I never got around to printing and selling some wares this year, well I might as well have just given up.

So ... things are afoot. I have loads more pics and designs to come, will post them after the weekend’s market. Also looking forward to getting a Facebook shop and webstore up to sell to wider audience, to see if this will float as they say.

I should add that New Zealand’s All Blacks won the 2011 Rugby World Cup and I am pretty bloody happy about it.