Hi everyone! How was your long weekend? Mine was so relaxing! D and I had some quality time on Friday and stayed up all night talking, Saturday we spent some time with a couple friends, Sunday Alysia and I had dinner and a movie with mama, and then yesterday I had the house to myself to get some stuff done. I re-did my about me page, finally made a press page, and last but not least finally got my shops ready to open! I love days off!
I wanted to chat a bit about the shop set up since it is a little different and I have had some people ask me to talk about my experience with storenvy vs. etsy. So here you go!
I have only ever had good experiences with Etsy. I think they started something so amazing and I am beyond proud to be a part of it. I have had manzanita on etsy for a couple of years now and so far it has been all I needed up until recently.
There are two main reasons why I decided to make a storenvy shop. The first one being that I wanted to have a little more to do with the design aspect of the shop. Now that I have had this blog for a while and I have become well acquainted with coding and such I thought it would be nice to have a shop that really fit my brand. I love how professional my storenvy shop looks!
The second reason is the biggest! I realized that custom work, while it is so fun, is sort of impractical for me while I have a full time job. So for now I won't be taking any custom orders. I will make what I want to make in the color I want and customers can buy it or not:) For now I really want to keep manzanita fun and when I have so many deadlines I begin to feel stressed out and that...well that sucks:)
This realization was scary for me because I didn't want a shop with just a few items in it. I love that etsy has sort of acted as my portfolio of sorts. All my designs are always on display so people can see what I have done. Well Etsy doesn't have a "sold out" option and as soon as I realized this is something I needed I began looking around.
After looking at other shop hosts like Big Cartel I decided on storenvy, because its free! I still don't quite understand how that works for them, but I am not complaining!
So now my storenvy shop will act as my custom order shop/manzanita portfolio and my etsy shop will be dedicated to only ready to ship items, which I plan on adding to on a weekly basis. I hope you'll check them out!
besitos,
rebecca
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Your shop envy shop is lovely!
Posted by: Anne Marie | 08 September 2012 at 02:41 PM
"I will make what I want to make in the color I want and customers can buy it or not:)" <-- This. Thank you. I was feeling bad for feeling slightly disappointed when I got certain custom orders. Everyone keeps wanting pink, purple and super girly--- and I love coming up with unique colour combinations and getting away from the "all little girls are princesses" thing. (Sadly, my next project is a pink butterfly princess, followed by a puppy in a skirt, and a Siamese cat hat that I have no idea how to do.) I'm planning on making a ton of dollies this winter-- green, blue, brown, red and anything but pink! The new shop looks lovely btw! I plan on putting a few things on my Christmas list :)
Posted by: Karen Taylor | 04 September 2012 at 03:01 PM
Awesome! Congrats on your success and hard work, when I started reading your blog you were just going on hiatus so I am very glad to see your shops up and running and look forward to ordering something!
xomando
Posted by: Mandy | 04 September 2012 at 01:26 PM