Order and chaos

When you make a lot of earrings, and every pair is unique, you necessarily have a lot of beads. This post is partly going to be about organising the beads themselves, but mostly about organising the web shop, which has been a bit of a headache of late; but let's talk about the beads first.

As I've mentioned in the past, I use a limited selection of bead types. The "bread and butter" beads are the seed beads, which come in 11/0 and 15/0 sizes (that is to say, they do come in larger sizes as well, but those are the two I use). 11/0 seed beads come in (relatively) large bags, generally between 10 and 25 g depending on the make and type, so I keep these bagged up in separate compartments in my larger boxes. 15/0 seed beads, on the other hand, come in 5 g bags, so I have several bags crammed into a compartment. Most of the other types of beads fit happily into compartments in the smaller boxes, but the MiniDuos and the bicones were getting to be a bit of a nuisance, because they were originally organised pretty much like the 15/0s. I kept them in colour order, as I do with the 15/0s, but I had quite a lot of them and they were getting unwieldy, especially the bicones. (These are quite expensive, so they come in bags of 30 pieces; and they're not very big, so a lot of these small ziploc bags will fit in one compartment, and if you're not careful they go all over the place. Thankfully the expense is not a huge consideration, because I use them for only one style, which takes four of them per pair. They're very sparkly, so they make good accent beads.)

So in the end I got fed up and I bought this box. It was sold for bead storage, but it's a pill box. I know it's a pill box because I've seen the same kind of box sold for that purpose, and it is logical; the compartments are in rows of four (joined together, so you can take out one row of four at a time if you want), and there are seven of these rows - well, in this case fourteen; this is a pill box either for one person for two weeks or two people for one week. It's worth mentioning that I do not organise my own medication like this because it would be dispiriting. What I do instead is pop it into a little "Dried Frog Pills" box from the Discworld Emporium, which makes me smile. But these boxes, as you see, are just perfect for the smaller beads; MiniDuos are normally sold by the 5 g, but 5 g doesn't get you very far so I tend to buy them in 10 g lots, and it just so happens that 10 g is the amount that comfortably fits in one of these little compartments. So that's a win.

That was easy enough. The shop... not so much. I had reached the point where I had 240 pairs of earrings up there, in 24 listings arranged by base style. They weren't doing too well (not a cause for immediate panic; as I've said before, patience is the key with web sales), so I thought it would be a good idea to sort them into a parallel set of listings arranged by colour, to make it easy for customers to search for the colour they wanted. So I sorted all the photos into colour groups, and was painstakingly listing them all; but soon I ran into a problem.

See, they're not all the same price. The fractals are made from bugle beads and 15/0s, which are pretty cheap. The hexagons are made from Lipsi Par Puca beads, which are really not cheap, plus some others. The other two styles are mid-price. They all take about the same amount of time to make, but the price difference in the materials is significant enough to need reflecting in the prices of the products. When I was just listing by style, that wasn't a problem, because all the pairs in the listing would be the same price (unless they had polychrome earwires, which are very expensive compared to the regular ones, so there'd be a slight premium on those, which Folksy's software can handle). But when I started listing by colour, I found that I had to price the whole group at the level of the cheapest item in it - which was, of course, almost always a fractal - because the site didn't allow negative price increments. So I had a lot of new listings which appeared to be almost all fractals. Technically I could have used a different style as the main photo; but it didn't seem quite right to have the item in the main photo in the group being more expensive than the price listed for the group as a whole.

I got on to Folksy and asked for their advice. They said I'd probably do better if I listed all the pairs individually, rather than grouping them into listings. After all, it won't cost me anything to do that, since I have Folksy Plus, which is their premium subscription thingy; I had a strong feeling I'd need it, and with 240 pairs of earrings listed individually I think it'll more than pay for itself! (And, of course, there will be more coming.) What I hadn't realised, but they very helpfully told me, is that one can group listings into collections; so I can put all my red earrings into one collection, and all my green ones into another, and so on, and so on, and I can have a Christmas collection as well, and earrings can appear in more than one collection without my having to do a whole shedload of stuff on the stock spreadsheet behind the scenes to keep track of them. That way, they will all be very easy to find (and won't have to be grouped in tens because that's the maximum number of photos allowed in a single listing).

So I took a deep breath, deleted all the colour listings I'd created so far, and set about the not inconsiderable process of shunting all the earrings into their own listings. At the moment I'm about two thirds of the way through. It is quite an undertaking; indeed, so much so that I haven't had time to make any more earrings while working on it. But at least, once it's finished, I won't have to do it again; and it will also mean I can list future pairs as I make them, rather than having to wait till I have ten in the same style (which, since I have four styles, has tended to mean I've listed them in groups of forty).

Also, curiously, I might be able to extend my shipping to the USA. Royal Mail are bringing in a new duty paid service, so that all the duty is included in the price of postage and nobody will get whammed with surprise customs fees before they can claim their parcel. I suspect this will mean I'll have to charge through the nose for p&p over there, but it seems people pay it; I found someone on Folksy the other day who sold genuine Sussex trugs (for those without Sussex connections, a trug is a rather elegant shallow oval garden basket made from thin wooden slats), and he shipped to the USA. His cheapest trug was £100 - I'm pretty sure they have to be made by hand, hence the price tag - and postage to the USA on all his trugs was £60. But I suppose if you're in the USA and you're already prepared to shell out that much for a garden basket, you'll probably not worry too much about the postage; and mine won't be anywhere near that much.

For the EU and Northern Ireland, you need an authorised representative. I'm not sure where I'd get one of those. But... one thing at a time, right?