New Shell Line Debuts this Fall
We're still searching for a final name for the line, suggestions welcome.
Anyway, here's a preview of our new line, made with glazed shell. The glaze catches the sun and sparkles in many colors, though out of the sun each appears to be one solid color (unlike these photos).
A limited amount of the shell line can be found in Enfield at All Things Creative on Main Street. The main debut will be at the show in the Boston Seaport World Trade Center. Come on down and see us! (Feel free to email if you'd like a coupon for several dollars off admission.)
This one is light blue, really, with an onyx center:
Green:
Pink:
Purple:
Brown with chalcedony:
All of these are on sterling silver hooks, though I know EP made a few with fresh water pearls and gold-filled earwires.
Items will be available for purchase on the website at a later date, stay tuned for details (you can also email if you want to purchase something you see here before the Boston show...after that it may be sold).
Labels: earrings, new items, shell, shows
Card Pics Example
Here's an example of the earring cards, taken in fairly bright light (overcast day, but directly in the light from the window. You can see how the grey card might be very hard to distinguish from the white cards in the dim lighting at some shows, especially if they're not next to each other. Also note how bright the logo is compared to some of the earrings. So, now all we have to do is flip all the cards and assign inventory numbers. Ick.
Labels: display, earrings
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
More earrings
We have some new earrings on the website this week, and hopefullly after the weekend we'll have a bunch more (borrowing a tripod and some other stuff this weekend).
You can see our newest items
here.
Labels: earrings
Dangle Earrings
Sterling silver with blue crystal. The top crystal hangs straighter when it's not leaning against my finger. Thoughts?
They take a while to make, so they're not going to be cheap (and chain is expensive compared to the cost of those blue beads)! I guess I've found something for our more expensive category, and a way to use up some chain I ordered and found to be too thin for my original project.
Labels: earrings
