The good ship Mongoose

When I was in my early twenties, someone rather ill-advisedly referred to me in my hearing as "a little fluffy thing". At which I grinned, and said, "OK. I'm a little fluffy thing. But I'm a little fluffy thing with teeth!" Someone else who was present immediately, and logically, concluded that I was therefore a mongoose, and it stuck. I have been Mongoose for the best part of forty years now.

So, when I needed to order some cards to put the earrings on and I therefore needed to think of a business name quickly, "Mongoose Designs" was the obvious one to pick. The cards have that printed at the top, and immediately underneath "Handmade in UK"; then, at the bottom, between the earrings, there's an e-mail address for custom enquiries... which is a slight risk, as one may get the loons, but my e-mail account is with Tuta (formerly Tutanota), and among the very many excellent things about Tuta is the fact that it is very easy to block someone if you need to. I hope not to need to, but you never know; and at any rate it's safer than putting your e-mail address out on the Internet, since you don't get the crawlerbots working for the spam sites. (And, incidentally, the Etsy shop who did the cards for me is called DIYinaSec - not sure about all the capitalisation there - and they're brilliant. It was quite an undertaking to find earring cards with the holes set far enough apart to display my big bold earrings properly, but these are amazing - really good quality, so they look very professional. And the company really couldn't be more helpful.)

The cards arrived yesterday morning, which was perfect; it meant that I could put my entire stock (21 pairs - that is to say, 7 in each style) on them in time to get them up to the shop. I very soon discovered that, while earwires stay very happily in your ears, they are not at all inclined to stay put on a piece of laminated card. The earrings kept falling out of the holes. So I did what you or anyone else would do in the circumstances, which was to go and get the sticky tape and tape the wires to the backs... and I am so very glad I did that, because it has other implications I hadn't thought of at the time. You see, UK distance selling regulations allow a purchaser to return an item for any reason within 14 days of purchase (which quite a few sellers will accept as starting from the day after the delivery date, which I'm fine with, because you don't know exactly how long the item is going to take to arrive)... provided the item hasn't been used. And if you have a loose pair of earrings, you have no idea if someone has had them in their ears; and I don't know about you, but I would be a little bit iffy about selling earrings that someone has worn. But if they're taped to a piece of card, you can just specify that they can be returned within 14 days as long as they're still taped to the card, and that's a problem solved that I didn't even know I potentially had. Win!

Preparations for the Etsy shop are now well under way. I have ordered an unfeasible number of little white jiffy bags (I have no idea where I'm going to put them, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it). I was originally rather put off Etsy because I was told the fees were prohibitive, but in fact it's not the fees that are the problem. Those are quite reasonable. It's the postage. My late father had a habit of converting prices into old money (which I am only just old enough to remember; I was seven when we went decimal), so that he could be even more scandalised by them than he really needed to be. And we'd laugh at him, because of course he never took inflation into account. But when I discovered that it costs £3.15 to post what is defined as a "Large Letter" (this category includes one of my little jiffy bags with a pair or two of earrings in it) first class, I could just hear my old dad going "What? But that's three guineas!" And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have laughed. It did, at first, seem a bit steep.

And then I had another of those things that keep happening. I told you the other day I'd ordered £yikes worth of beads from Spoilt Rotten. Now I was already on pretty good terms with that company, but even so I was quite surprised when I got a phone call out of the blue from the owner. (It's a small company, but it's not a one-person operation. They have a warehouse.) She explained that they were unexpectedly out of stock of the sparkle grey 15/0 seed beads I'd ordered, but they did have something almost identical and it was cheaper, so would I like a substitution? I said, yes please, and we had a bit of a chat... and this was how I discovered something I probably wouldn't have found out otherwise, or at least not for a long time.

It turns out that you can go to the Royal Mail website, go to "pay for postage", fill in all the relevant details, and get an address label... which you don't have to print. So I do not, after all, have to buy a printer (which I don't really want due to space considerations). They will print it for you and the postie will bring it round with the post, at which point you can stick it on your parcel (sorry, Large Letter) and they'll take it away.

I don't have to go to the post office, which is in the next village and very awkward (I can't get the scooter in there, so I have to hang on to the fixtures and fittings). I don't even have to get to the post box, which is just outside the community centre, so not very far (but obviously no fun if it's pelting down). This is going to save me such a fortune in opportunity costs that I'm really not that upset about the price of postage any more! (Of course, I'll still have to charge more on Etsy than in the local shop in order to cover that; but still, I'll be getting a really good service for my money.)

So now I need to do two things. One is to recoup my initial outlay, which I'm not in a massive hurry to do, because the shorter the transition period between "I am now making a profit so I need to report all my earnings to the DWP" and "yay, I am making enough to live on, I can stop my claim altogether", the better. And the second is to get to the point where I have both enough stock and enough information to open the Etsy shop; that will almost certainly happen first, unless the good folk of East Anglia suddenly descend on the local shop in droves and buy my earrings at a great rate. I have (obviously!) made a few pairs since I took the entire stock over to the shop, and I don't think they'll be wanting any more for a little while, so this is a good time to start building up. Right now I am working like a beaver and enjoying it all immensely. Quite a lot of the fun is in putting together colour combinations that I wouldn't wear in a million years, but that other people are going to love.

Neon orange, anyone? Someone is going to want that!