On our adventures today, myself and my Little decided we were going to have a little bonding session and organise all of mummy's charms! It sounded great in theory however trying to keep a 3 year old focused on the task at hand when there's lots of shiny things around becomes impossible. Within 5 minutes she had ran off with a teddy charm and a turtle charms and sat in a corner playing with them!!
This however was a great distraction and allowed myself to properly sort and organise the many, many charms I have.
Charms play a big part of my business, when choosing the ones I want to buy I have to think about what product I am going to be making with them e.g. row counters or stitch markers, will I need beads? if so, what colour and style would be best suited. What colour metal are they made with? Silver, gold? Do I have enough findings of either colour to make the final product?
Previously all my charms were all over the place. I had 6 organisers of various sizes filled with charms in no clear order. The golds and silvers were all mixed up, the styles I often used together where in separate containers and I often found when completing orders that I was needing to rummage through multiple containers trying to find the right charms.
Another important downside to this was also that I couldn't see how many of each charm I had left, which meant there was a possibility that I could run out and receive an order which required that particular charm.
It took over an hour but I finally got them all organised in clear boxes keeping all the silver together and the same with the gold.
I can now see at a glance what I'm looking for and what I need to reorder.
One of the positives I found when doing this was discovering the charms which I have listed in my Etsy store that haven't moved in a while. This of course is dead stock and now I need to come up with some new ways to get it moving again.
One such charm was of course the Gummy Bear. I first starting selling these charms as stitch markers back when my shop first opened in 2020, during the first year these sold very well, so well in fact that I had reorder stock a couple of times. However as we got into 2022 I only received a couple of orders at the beginning of the year, the last order I had of these was at Easter 2022. During my reorganising I discovered I still had over 50 of these charms remaining so now I need a new way of selling.
Of course my first idea is to turn these sweet charms in to knitting row counters so I checked my bead stock and discovered that I had similar colours in the glass pearls.
Unfortunately the decision to make these occurred 20 minute before I had to leave and pick Little up from nursery. I had just enough time to put the supplies together and make start on adding beads to the heart charms.
The colours I had suited the charms perfectly and tomorrow I plan on making a start on the chain sections.
I'm very excited to see these as completed items and hopefully I can bring some attention back to them in my shop.
Update:
So today I managed to get a whole 2 hours in which I could work on making stock for my shop.
I managed to make 4 Gummy bear chain markers, one of each colour and even had time to make a turtle row counter for a customer. It doesn't sound like much of an achievement, however I very rarely get that time to focus on creating new things.
I'm very happy with the way these turned out, the colour combinations are spot on and if I had to pick a favourite? it would definitely be the blue.
I'm hopeful the changes that I've made to these charms will encourage more sales! Find them here:
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