Bead on a Wire Blog

This is an interesting article written by a founder of Etsy. As a newish seller with Etsy, I was happy to learn more about how Etsy, as a company iteself, works and also the vision for their future.

However, I do have a couple concerns or things that I see could become issues as the company grows:

1. “We run the company as a democracy, meaning no one party has the power to act unilaterally.”

I’m a firm believer that you can’t run anything well by committee. While the idea of not having a “busk stops here” head of Etsy seems appealing, at some point someone will become the leader, the head, the power to act unilaterally. It will be essential, imho. It’s why pretty much all successful companies have CEOs.

2. “… The majority of our employees are under 35 years of age, and we have an exuberance that knows no age.”

The exuberance is good and it’s how they have managed to grow Etsy to what it is so quickly. It’s also why I feel they’ve missed some important needs for their buyers and sellers, such as improving the search function and improving the checkout process instead of adding fancy new functions like Pounce or the Gift Guides. That their staff are all so young means that they don’t have input from a more mature demographic and it shows. I know there are a lot of older sellers whose sensibility isn’t reflected as much in the public face of Etsy (the front page and Gift Guides, to be specific).

The Gift Guides are a whole other subject of contention among sellers, but that’s another post for another day.

For my two concerns aside, the Etsy staff are listening to their clientele, as evidenced by Rob’s list of things they plan to work on, including the checkout and search. I’m excited to see how they fix these issues as well as the add-ons that are sure to come.

I love Etsy and plan to be a seller and buyer there for a long time. It’s a great resource and I think they’ve got a good vision for the future.

I was at church tonight for an event and the coordinator of it came up to me just before it started. We exchanged pleasantries and then she pushed her hair back and with both hands grabbed her earrings to show me.

“Hey, look at these!” she exclaimed.

It took me a second to recognize them and then I was confused because she wasn’t the person who bought them. And then when it clicked for me, she said, “You made these! K gave them to me and I love them.”

K bought several pairs of earrings from me. I wonder who else got my work for Christmas.

These are the earrings…

I speak of taxes. I’m dreading the work of putting together our income taxes this year. I’ve been married for two years. The first year our taxes were easy. This year, not so much because of two new things that occurred in 2007:

1. We had a baby in January ‘07

2. I started a small business in May ‘07

Both are great additions to our family. However, the increased complication to doing our taxes is now raising its ugly head.

What’s odd is that my day job is as a budget analyst for a federal law enforcement agency that is not the FBI. Think The Fugitive. I’m awesome at my job, if I do say so myself. I’m a great bookkeeper and accountant when it comes to your tax dollars. Sadly, that expertise does not translate to my personal finances and now my business finances.

What makes things tougher is that we moved to a new house in August. So where things were slightly disorganized before the move, things are now overwhelmingly, depressingly disorganized after the move. I normally have piles on my desk. But I have piles upon piles of receipts and invoices that I need to sort through to create my books (yes, I said create. I haven’t even done that yet). I also need to inventory my entire stock of supplies, some of which I’ve had for three years and for which I no longer have receipts. I’ll have to figure out how to price those items based on how they’re priced by the vendors I use today. And I also need to inventory my finished pieces. Fortunately, I started an inventory numbering system, so everything is marked. But I still need to catalog it all. It’s going to be a huge task and I can’t put it off any longer. *sigh*

One thing I think will help is the specially designed spreadsheet package that I purchased from JJMFinance on Etsy. His wife has an Etsy shop and he, being an accountant by day, lovingly created accounting tools for her. We get the benefit of his expertise now that he’s selling those tools to the Etsy community. From poking around the two sheets that I bought, I know that these are exactly what I need to get organized. I’m especially excited about the marketing sheet. And I just noticed that he has a jewelry raw materials manager, too. Smart fella to create that one since there are so many jewelry designers on Etsy.

Today is the day to start weeding my desk. Pray for me.

I managed to list some new things the other day. On Monday we had bright sunshine, so I took the pieces outside to take pictures. For some reason I like how some things look in with the harsher shadows and bright light. I love how the light reflects through certain glass beads or crystals. And the colors are never truer than in the sun, imho.

I especially love this particular picture, which is my new Etsy avatar…

These are my new listings from that photoshoot:

Just made my first pair of earwires. I think they turned out pretty well for my first attempt. They resulted in this pair of earrings (I’ll take better pictures and list them tomorrow, most likely).

[UPDATE]: I opted to keep this pair for myself. I made a new, slightly different pair with the same gray swirly beads. They are shown in the post above.

I consign my beaded tea infusers with a shop in Philadelphia - VIX Emporium. I sent eight infusers to the shop for their grand re-opening in November. There were no sales of infusers in November, but I just got notification of my first payment for the sales from December and it turns out that four infusers sold - Three of the cup sized infusers and one of the pot sized ones. I’m very excited!

The holidays combined with a two week nasty cold means that I’m still having a hard time getting back into the swing of creating anything new. This is sad since I got all sorts of new tools and supplies for Christmas, too.

I’m going to force myself to the craft table tonight after work. Here’s hoping something lovely comes from my stale hands.

I am thinking about making more necklaces similar to the one I made for my mother for Christmas, but these will be geared to brides. The more I look at that set I made, the more I think a bride or two might like it, too.

[Post Updated January 6, 2008]

I listed a bridal bouquet package yesterday after getting a lot of positive feedback in the Etsy fora to do so. Now we’ll see if anyone decides to go this route in their wedding planning.

Here’s an example in pictures:

I made the above when I was planning my own wedding. They turned out much more lovely that I expected and while they took a lot of work (6 months of twisting wire!), they were well worth that time and I have a forever keepsake. With a lot of thought about whether or not I want to spend that much time working on someone else’s wedding, I realized that I would love to be able to give a bride a creative and unique element to her Big Day. And I’m hoping it will be a lucrative business decision, too, of course.

Related, since my mother is a tea merchant, she did our wedding favors. She also spent some time deciding if she could accommodate the work involved in such potential large personalized orders for a wedding and we convinced her that she could (with our help, of course). So she now offers a customized wedding favor in her online store.

Here are pictures of her product photo - these were my favors; I made the tags: