E Cubed Arts

Earring Card Issues

We had a great idea for our earring cards. We designed the card so it could be punched at the top to hang on a hook, and the earrings would go on either side of the punch. In the center of the card was the logo, and the name/website at the bottom. The card was correctly sized to fit inside the earring boxes we bought. Materials for each pair of earrings would be printed on a little sticker that would go on the back of each card. Earrings would go in two price categories, one on white cards and the other on gray. It seemed like such a good idea. Unfortunately after we printed 900 cards and put earrings on half of them and hung them all up, we noticed some problems.

1. Under poor lighting, it was impossible to tell one color cardstock from the other, and this caused lots of issues. At one show I ended up selling all the earrings for the low price, since no one could tell them apart.
2. The bright logo, the shiny chrome gridwall, the shiny hooks, etc, were very distracting and you couldn't really see the earrings unless you picked up the card. It was overwhelming and lots of people just walked on by rather than coming into the booth.
3. Inventory nightmare...we had no idea what we'd sold, and what might have been lost or stolen. We had a list of what we made but it was often difficult to match the earrings to the list.
4. Setup/teardown mess. In the future we might have to figure out a way to store/transport the earrings on the hooks so we could just pop the hooks onto the gridwall.

So our first year in the big leagues taught us a bunch (you can never go wrong with more lighting) and we're getting ready for another busy year.

Step 1 is to flip over all of the cards so the logo is on the back and the earrings sit on a plain card for better visibility. I don't think we can afford new gridwall right now but our next purchase will be white gridwall & hooks. Then we're going to assign an individual inventory number to everything we have (which will involve changing out everything we have at All Things Creative and the CMAA gallery) and link those numbers to our list. Hopefully then we'll know what item went where, and what we sold at each show. Hopefully we'll start to do enough shows that we can get a feel for what sells where.

Labels: display, earrings

posted by EA @ 12:35 PM