COMING SOON: Sell Your Handmade Items Here!

Would you like practical help to sell your handmade wares?

What if tens or hundreds of other handmakers help sell your products?

These opportunities will here for you at Pretty Somethings.

Don't miss out - register for launch updates

Pretty Somethings is evolving. The concept is simple: Bring serious handmakers together and give them easy to use tools and straightforward advice to help them sell. And remember, our advice comes from real-world experience running online gift retailer, pressies4princesses.

But that's not the really exciting bit. We want to creat a meritocracy. A place where you get rewarded for your efforts.

You see, there are going to be lots of tools to help you build a stunning web presence at Pretty Somethings. And, more to help you reach out to web audiences. When you do that and bring customers in, you will earn - even if they buy from another handmaker.

Think of it as a second chance. Of course you want to sell your own stuff. But, your own inimitable style won't appeal to all. On your own website, you get no payback on your efforts to attract visitors who don't buy your products. Here, visitors you attract will have many more styles and ranges to choose from. And, if you brought them here, you will earn a commission on any sale by any handmaker. Bingo! Suddenly a sensible return on your investment of time and money is in reach!

Of course, in addition to the handmakers' collective efforts, we will be working hard on your behalf to bring customers in. Who are we? The management team behind successful and fast-growing gift retailer pressies4princesses. And, when we bring in the sale, we will get rewarded. It's a system that works for everyone - both ways.

Fixed/ joining fees will be as low as possible. In the tens of pounds, rather than hundreds. We want your effort not your cash!

Here are some of the things you will soon be able to do here:

Sell your handmade products

Promote your handmaking to the media

Attract new customers

Pool marketing efforts with other handmakers

Interact with other handmakers

Get rewarded for helping others sell

Run your blog and/or main web presence

Interact with customers

...plus much more


Register now for email updates of our relaunch. Then you won't miss out on early bird offers.

Sell Handmade

Do you want to sell more of your handmade products? Of course you do. What a silly question. Well, I suspect two things are stopping you selling more.

1) Your relative obscurity. You can't sell to people who don't know you even exist. And, most likely, that's almost everyone. You're a handmaker, first and foremost, not a web marketing expert. If you wanted to be designing and building websites, you would hardly be wasting your time on handmade products.

2) Your lack of range. Chances are you simply don't have enough stuff to sell. It's rarely economically viable to build an online marketing campaign around 10 or 20 or even 50 products. OK, there are exceptions. It works for products targeting very specialised needs, like hair loss. But, for pure discretionary purchases like jewellery, style accessories, homewares, giftware, it mainly doesn't. You just can't cover enough tastes and price points. This makes it hard to make investments in advertising or even search engine optimisation pay.

Don't believe me? Well consider this, clawing your way out of obscurity means beating literally hundreds of thousands (if you're lucky) or millions of other websites. And, they aren't all plucky amateurs with meagre resources and budgets, either. Consider, also that the average conversion rate on a website is just 2-3%. The smaller your range the worse that's going to get. It's logical. If you had just one lovely necklace, would it really wow all your visitors? What about if you had ten thousand necklaces all different?

Why am I telling you this? Well, I am not saying throw in the towel on your website. Or, maybe I am when it comes to having your own, standing on its lonesome. Maybe your efforts on the web would be better spent where the traffic is? Head for the aggregators - places where shoppers can browse lots of handmade items. Get there and work on standing out in the crowd. That way, more than half the job is done for you. They already dragged the shoppers in, which is the real battle!

Hand-makers: What's your problem?

Handmakers - what's the biggest thing holding you back? What's the hardest thing about hand-making or, better still, making money from it? What would make you more successful, most? If you could ask a fairy god mother to wave her magic wand and make one thing happen, what would it be?

I'll tell you why I want to know. It's for two reasons. Firstly, I have entered a period of "post exhaustion". It happens from time to time. You lose your way and motivation. I have been writing this blog for over a year now with very little feedback!

The second reason I want to know is I think I can help. Especially, if the main answer is what I suspect it is - being less invisible.

The web has been great for hand-making. It's given designer/makers access to a mass market, a global market. But, as the web has grown exponentially, so it has become increasingly difficult for any individual business to be seen.

These days, having a website seems just the start of your problems, doesn't it? Because, once you have it, you have to try to get people to visit it. And, that's not easy. Adwords or pay-per-click can be prohibitively expensive. While, PR, search engine optimisation and other forms of marketing all require either lots of time or lots of money or both.

But hey, I am second guessing your response. Please, please do drop me a comment and tell me what's troubling your handmaking business; what's holding you back; what you are struggling to fix. Alternatively, you can email me at steve@pretty-somethings.co.uk

I hope to hear from you. Thanks.

Steve