The 3 rookie mistakes I made when I started my handmade jewelry business
In 2017 my mom and I started our handmade jewelry business. In this post, I will talk about the things I wish I’d considered earlier with the hope that it might help you avoid some mistakes along the way.
I didn’t always have the urge to create. It came as a natural desire once I realized what I truly wanted from life — freedom. To live, to express myself, to do what my heart desires.
That’s how I got inspired to start my own business. One thing led to another and I ended up teaming up with my mom to create Drops of Emotions.
It’s been a year and a half since we started and I remember myself sitting in front of the same laptop, reading about other people’s success stories and thinking “In a year I could be like them!”. Well, it didn’t happen. It’s still not close to happening to be honest, but at least the path is getting clearer which is motivating.
Here are the 3 rookie mistakes I made in the first months that still have an impact on our business today.
1. Mistake one: The world is my oyster, I have to sell everything, everywhere!
As someone who lives in a small European country, I had to decide one main thing first. Should I start locally and build up from there or go internationally straight ahead. As a typical millennial, I had a rush of F.O.M.O (Fear Of Missing Out) moment and I decided I wanted both. I used a ready-made platform to build a website for the local market while mom was making some of the first diffuser and real flower jewelry models. Together we started going to local handmade festivals and a few months later I opened our Etsy shop. Maybe if that’s all you do it’s okay, but when you have a day job and very limited time it’s starts to get overwhelming very fast. Then you start getting impatient and you make bad decisions.
For example, we had too many different models. Glass diffuser jewelry, wish bottle jewelry, resin necklaces, resin earrings, glow in the dark models, stainless steel jewelry and numerous combinations of all of that. It’s a natural process to experiment with materials and jewelry designs while you are searching for your own unique style. The key thing here is to give it time.
In our case, the wise thing to do would’ve been to go to as many local handmade festivals as possible. To talk to people, to see what they like and what’s not so popular.
Instead, we kept making more new jewelry models, I took pictures of all of them and posted both on the website and on Etsy. Since those were my first pictures I was constantly irritated because I couldn’t get them right. So I ended up paying for photos which as it turned out later, I couldn’t use because those models were not popular and they didn’t fit the style we were after.
The result from this chaotic mess was many lost hours of work, irritation and financial losses. Sure, we learned a lot of DOs and DONTs but we did it the hard way. Had we chosen to focus locally and most importantly be patient about getting that right first, we would have saved ourselves a lot of trouble.
2. Mistake two: Website & Etsy Shop all at once? Bring it on!
This mistake is very tightly connected to the first one as it again goes down to the lack of focus.
Besides my desire to sell everywhere, the other reason I wanted both a website and an Etsy shop was that I underestimated how much work I would have to dedicate to each.
When you start out and decide to use a ready-made platform for your website, have one thing in mind: It’s never as easy as they say it will be. Not even close. It will have bugs, you won’t know how to do a lot of the stuff and when you finally get it up and running, you have to optimize it for search engines and put great content inside. The same goes for opening an Etsy shop with the only difference being that Etsy is very user-friendly and you will set it up quite easy, which is the last easy thing you’ll see from Etsy.
Once you have a website you have to promote it. Once you have an Etsy shop you have to promote it. This means one thing: social media. That’s very hard work that, once again, I underestimated. This leads me to the next mistake.
3. Mistake three: I will have separate social media accounts for the local and global market, how hard can it be?
Looking back at this decision I can’t help but wonder ‘What the hell was I thinking?’. This mistake is the one currently reflecting on me the most. Today I have two Instagram accounts, a Twitter account, a Facebook page (and a group) and my newest addition — Pinterest (I also manage inventory and take pictures for our website and for our Etsy shop, go to work from 9 to 6 and attend local handmade festivals once every few weekends).
If you are wondering how I am managing — I am not. That’s why I am posting similar content to the local and global Instagram accounts and adapt it for Facebook and Twitter. That, of course, doesn’t make it much easier because I still have to translate it and make sure it sounds good both in English and Bulgarian.
I managed to pull this off for a few months and then I just started posting vaguely here and there, which killed any momentum I had started to gain. Recently I see the light and the way out of my own mess but I’ll leave that for a next post.
The bottom line here is that you should never, ever underestimate how much work quality social media content is. Even if you just have to take pictures of your beautiful craft and write captions for them — it takes time, more than you imagine at first.
To sum up, I would say that all three mistakes originate from the same root. Lack of focus which resulted in an average website, an average Esty shop and an average social media presence. It is only in the last couple of months that I started putting together a plan to make things right. The number one ‘to-do’ on my plan is to find focus. Actually, scratch that, to choose my focus.
With so many endless opportunities to get your handmade crafts out there and show them to the world, it’s not easy to choose just one. But it’s a must when you start out. That’s my greatest lesson so far andI learned it the hard way.
Do you love handmade jewelry and crafts? Perhaps you own a handmade business of your own? Share your thoughts in the comments below and let’s help each other create more beautiful things and show them to the world.
