DaLove for DaFont

Whenever I tell people about dafont.com I feel like I'm giving away some great trade secret. But that's a little like assuming that showing people the library means they're all going to write best-selling novels.

I am a font nerd. It probably happened long before I worked for American Greetings, but while there I had access to their entire collection of proprietary and non-proprietary fonts, and sweet mother of Garamond it was beautiful. A sentiment's feel can change entirely based on the look of the letters used.
Case in point:Same "three little words," but four very different sentiments.
Playful, romantic, plain (Times New Roman just for contrast, though it can be a useful font and has its own feel and indications, t00) and homicidal. You don't send the second one to your brother or the last to your mother (unless you're me and think it's funny).

This is all terribly important (well, not Darfur important) for my cards, especially the ones I do that are just text with no other art (i.e. the "don't spend it all in one place" and "thank you" cards I do with the wallpaper envelope things). It's been particularly on my brain because now I'm making "have your people call my people" cards to go with business cards as little somethings to give when/after you meet new networky types and want them to actually remember you and your business card instead of sticking it in their pocket/wallet and losing it forever or just not giving a flying fig. I spent quite some time on dafont rejecting font after font for being not friendly enough or too casual and on and on and once I'd narrowed it down to a few I tried them out on mock-up cards and found a winner: Labtop by Apostrophic Labs. We'll see if it stays the winner long-run, but for now, the first batch of "have your people call my people" cards are getting printed up that way and hopefully listed on Etsy this weekend.

And where do I get all my fonts? Dafont.com. They are free. Yes, that's right, free. Font designers are wonderful creatively sharing people. Since I've started selling my stuff I try to only download the fully "free" fonts instead of the "free for personal use" ones so I don't do anything illegal/evil. I should try to contact the designers of some of my favorite fonts and interview them for my blog. That would be swell.

I need to eat something now.

What a NERD!

1:30 in, that's me. I just found out yesterday the thing was on television because we ran into family friends at the movies (after which we went for Chinese, just to be good stereotypical Jews on Christmas) and they asked me about it. Crazy!

Swimming in the Data Pool

Ok, it's mini-pricing lesson time, but this one will be very mini and very simple, to be expanded later possibly by request and/or payment, as I'm looking for ways to make more money and I see how much the few people selling spreadsheets are making on Etsy and I think that I need to start tapping that market, too, but in the places it's clearly not even being tapped.

Mini-lesson of the day:
Pool your data.

This goes well as a pun with my one-of-a-kind hand-sewn fish swimsuit seller, so let's go back to her. It turns out, she's not the only one on Etsy selling fish swimsuits. Of course, no one else's fish swimsuits are exactly like her fish swimsuits, but there's a school of sellers around and they've even started a team called Team Swimmy Suit. They want to pool their data because some girl with a blog told them that was a good idea, but they don't know what this means or how to do it.

Here's how to do it.

Make a spreadsheet. Google Docs is wonderful for this because you can create a single online spreadsheet that everybody is allowed to edit, either by invitation only or by making it open access.
On that spreadsheet, you want to make places to enter the date the item sold, the price for which the item sold (how you want to deal with shipping is up to you, but I like to give it its own column), and the very general type of item. (Oh, dear lord, she made an example!) For fish bathing suits, the team might decide to split it up into small, medium, and large with columns for one-piece versus two-piece and extra places to check-off special characteristics that might effect the price, like custom, recycled, or jewel-encrusted. (Team SwimmySuit example. No, I really didn't have time for this.)

Then, you want as many people as possible to fill in as many sales as possible. The more data you have, the better your pricing info will be. Lucky for everybody, it doesn't matter if you haven't been keeping track of your sales thus far, since Etsy does it for you on your sold orders page. In theory, everything you need to fill out a spreadsheet should be there: date sold, price (with shipping separate), and what the thing was.

When you have a lot of data, it's time to analyze. It's up to you what constitutes a lot...How frequently do these items sell and how many people sell them and how wide is the range of what's out there? Fish bathing suits may be less common than felted boogers may be less common than beaded earrings. You know your craft. Just keep collecting data after you've started analyzing, too.
Hopefully, someone on your team has taken stats 101. If not, find out if someone on your team is sleeping with someone who has taken stats 101, or is the parent of someone who has taken stats 101. If that, too fails, pay someone like me to do it.

The easiest and most useful stuff for you to learn from the little exercise is how many fish swimsuits sold over time for each price range. That's the info you can then use to decide where to price your own items at the real true "bestish" pricing point, or at least the closest thing you're ever going to get to it.
You'll also want to pull out of your data pool analysis whether or not your extra column check boxes had any effect on the price. There's shmancy stats things you can do involving "r squared" and other crap, or you can just tell the spreadsheet software to do certain things if a column has a certain answer in it and see if the final totals change (which is why I no longer remember any formulas I learned in stats or econometrics).
A good stats-knowing person will look at the data in a whole bunch of different ways and see what sorts of other useful things pop out, too. Holiday trends, time trends, if a certain user's items always sell for significantly more or less than other people's and taking them out makes the rest of the numbers make more sense, etc. I'm too ADDesque to do this crap all the time, but I do find it interesting in short spurts.

In the end, even with all this wonderful information, your pricing will still be up to you. It will never be perfect and will more likely be a range than a number, plus people may hold onto "people pay more for recycled fish swimsuits" like a superstition even if the data proves otherwise. But if you make something even vaguely homogeneous with a team, jump into the pool. It can't hurt.

Betsy, Base, B'DOH!

Maybe I'm just slow, but I just learned about Betsy Search. It's a website that lets you search Etsy things in convenient ways that Etsy doesn't, like a search that only includes shops that will ship to your country. There's a search for just within yarn, another for beads.

Also available at this glorious website, a tutorial on how to stick my things on GoogleBase. Base is the way Google lets you post things for sale that then become Google searchable. I tried GoogleBase once before, but I didn't know what I was doing and ended up adding a few select items one at a time and that blew goats. Now, with the help of the tutorial, I might actually manage to keep my stuff more individually Google-searchable and then more people will buy my products so I can finally afford that giant laser to destroy the moon and take over the world.

Wait...scratch the last part.

I'm now having a helluva time convincing GoogleBase that my xml file is properly formatted...either the Betsy tutorial isn't as wonderful as originally thought, or I'm screwing up some bit of minutia that is terribly necessary for XML and HTML and all this stupid web language crap. This is why I do not want to be a web person. I'm more comfortable screwing around with code than many, but it makes me want to punch things. Glorious update later, perhaps, if I can get a webbier friend to take a look and tell me. This is why it's nice to A) be of my ridiculously youthful and computer-savvy generation B) have giant nerds for friends and C) be a giant nerd.

Sweet mother of templates

Someone in EtsyGreetings sent the link to this wonderful page of free blog templates: http://lenatoewsdesigns.blogspot.com/

So first I messed around with just changing my template to one of theirs. I really liked a few of them except for "_____" where "______" was the image at the top or the background or some other detail that didn't it my personal style/snarkitude (how dare they be imperfect, the free site amazing service that they are and all). I chose one I thought was close enough and started to personalize it, but the top image just kept bothering me and I wondered if I could change it to my scissors background thing I use on my shop banner without exploding all the HTML code and such.

Fortunately, I am a giant nerd. I found the spot in the HTML for the template that had the link to the image I didn't want. I dragged it into Photoshop, thinking I'd just play around with it a little, maybe add a poop heart or some of the sheep that Amy drew for the "ewe" cards. But it looked dumb, so I tried using the original banner's dimensions and changing it entirely to my scissors thing, then uploading my new branded-ier banner to flickr, taking the URL of the full size image, and pasting it into the template HTML where the old banner image link was. Bingo. But now my banner didn't go with the background (which I really liked). So I found the background image URL (not far from the banner one) and started playing with THAT, only to overhaul THAT whole thing...I'm still not thrilled with the background, but I feel very techno-savvy and my blog is now undeniably mine-looking. Maybe tomorrow I'll take some photos of googly eyes and yarn or something and turn that into the background instead. Seems a bit ridiculous considering how much time I spent arranging those photos for the current background, but I'm in Super-Fuzzy-Stabby-Head Mode, so I was bound to get stuck on some strange useless project or another.

No, Freud (my dog), you may not have my artichoke kalamata hummus.

Things that remind me of things

I made a treasury today that had been in my head for awhile. All these things reminded me of other things that made me think of other things, so I had to make them into a treasury. Look at it, please.
Econ 201: The Felted Booger Maker Pricing Explanation will be coming soon...especially once my car is in the shop (stupid truck squished it) and it becomes a pain in the ass to actually GO places. I may put out a little zine-type publication of Econ for Etsy things (shaynamaidel's idea) and sell it through my shop...it'd be a good way to be a paid writer again and still help people out, just not for free. Cheap, but not free. So long as my stupid migraines keep me from getting a normal person job, I need to actually make money elsewhere. Cards, banners, econ blabberings. Whatever works.

Econ 101: Jill gets sick of dumb pricing advice

I am not a brilliant pricer. I haven't mastered magic numbers for my shop. I haven't spent enough time researching it, but I have the advantage of knowing the economic theory behind it. It has nothing to do with the cost of my time and supplies multiplied by a magic number. In fact, for products I've already made, those things should barely come into account.

WHAT?

Yes. Revolutionary. And a little bit counter-intuitive.

Maybe you never took Econ 101. Maybe it made no sense. Maybe you hated it. But you've heard of "supply and demand." The part of supply and demand we care about right now is that a buyer will want to spend less money and you want to make more money.
Now let's do an imaginary Etsy example.
Let's say you make one-of-a-kind hand-sewn fish swimsuits. Even if they are free, some buyers still won't want them because they don't have fish, or their fish can't wear Lycra, or they just don't like your particular style. Fine.
Let's say this month you made 25 fish swimsuits. If you keep lowering your prices and your fish swimsuits are still not selling, you're probably at the point where all the people who have found your shop and would actually want to buy your fish swimsuits at any price have already made their purchases. Go advertise, fix your photos, change your product line, etc. Lowering your prices more probably won't help. After all, you aren't the only fish swimsuit seller and there is a limited total number of people who need handmade fish swimsuits in their lives.
But what if those 25 suits flew off the shelves at $1 a piece? Then you made $25. Swell.
The next month you again make 25 fish swimsuits. You want to see how much you can possibly charge, so you start with your price at $1,000 a suit and lower it until you get a sale (NOTE: this is not something I'm advising you do, since it's not like Etsy or your personal site has the traffic to make this really work, though it might be fun to try on one item just to see). Your sale finally comes in at $250. Holy crap! Someone paid $250 for a fish swimsuit! You rule!
So you should start charging $250 for your fish swimsuits and list one a day.
NO. WRONG. BAD.
Because let's say you lowered it to $200, maybe you'd sell two a month (that's $400 total per month, FYI). And what if you lowered it to $100? Holy crap, you just sold 10 of them! that's $1000 a month! $75? 20 of them, giving you $1,500!
"Ok, so then I want to lower my price until everything sells."
NO. WRONG. BAD AGAIN.
Because now let's say in order to sell all 25 of them, you have to lower your price to $50, and that gives you $1,250. When you were charging $75, you only sold 20 of your 25 sweaters, but you made $1,500. That's an extra $250. $250 buys a lot of really cute felted crap from other Etsy sellers.

"So, wait. The best price to charge is some arbitrary-seeming number that probably doesn't sell all the stuff in my shop but also isn't the the most people are willing to pay and has nothing to do with how much it cost me to make it?"
YES. If it's already made and it's not doing you any good to hold onto it. Because once you've made it, all of those "how much it cost me, how much time it took, etc" things become what the econ world officially calls fixed costs or sunk costs. They don't change if you get $1 or $10,000 for the item. As a person who handmakes things myself, I understand the sentimental attachment involved, but I use that as a sort of base worth it has to me, so no matter what I'm not willing to part with it for less than that amount.

More on fixed costs: if I spend twice the time making a card because I did the whole thing with my left hand because I thought it would be more artistic and force me to be more mindful of my creation if I made the card lefty, and it comes out looking almost the same but a little worse than the card I made immediately before it with my right hand, a buyer is not going to pay me twice as much for the one lefty card to cover the two righty cards I could have made in that same amount of time.
"But it took me twice as long!"
Yes, please, whine like that to the buyers, too. If you're doing processes that take double the time and really sinking your teeth into the integrity (note: this is different from the actual product quality, which would lead to repeat customers. I'm talking about things that aren't visible in the final product, like the fight I had with my printer because it's my grandpa's old printer but I'm loathe to get rid of it because part of me thinks he haunts it except not really) then you need to be doing it for the integrity and not expect your buyers to pay you more, too.

"How the fuck do I find this arbitrary-seeming perfect pricing number?"
How do I get a flat stomach by June? Sorry I don't have a quick-fix. Unfortunately, you need data. And even all the data in the world won't get you a perfect solution, because even if you had an entire year's worth of data, there are all sorts of other things that come into play (maybe a major movie comes out one month in which Brad Pitt makes out with a fish wearing a fish swimsuit that's totally like the kind you make! Or maybe you finally re-do all your pictures and your sales jump up) and how are you supposed to know how much that changed things? And this is all assuming you have a fairly homogeneous (most of your crap is similar) product line. How the hell do you price that one random item? Yeah, good luck with that. But as a start, try playing around with your pricing in an orderly fashion. See how many items you've been selling and your total income week by week or month by month for the lasts year or six months or however long you've been on Etsy. Now try raising your prices a bit at a time week by week and see what it does to your income. If it goes up, keep going up. If it goes down, try lowering. See if you sell more. If not, don't keep lowering. It's like that lemonade stand computer game (less than 20 years ago I played it on an Apple IIe with no graphics...I'm too young to feel this old...) only your shop is your lemonade stand. You can play a free version online here.

What would be really nice is if sellers got together and could share data, or if Etsy could release some data to sellers. Maybe I'll ask my Aquatic Animal Lycra Team (AALT) to start sharing data on Google Docs or something so we can all have a better idea about pricing, but that might be considered price-fixing and might be a little illegal. Still, if just a few of us pooled resources, how is that any different from standard market research? Clearly, I need a marketing department. Where's my dog? He could totally do it.*

Ok, deep breath.

Now, let's say you make felted boogers. Hundreds of them. You frequently make them to order, and you can easily make more or less depending on what people want and seem to be buying. You are the seller who needs to worry about the time it takes to make each item and your materials costs and things. You are much more complicated. I'm too tired to deal with you right now, but if you're lucky, I might try to figure out a way to make the theoretical crap actually practical and useful another day.

But the more immediate reason I bring you up, oh maker of felted boogers, is that it will be obvious to you that if you are at the point where all the people who know about your shop and want your felted boogers have already purchased them, you stop making them until the demand returns. You work on your advertising and your photos, or maybe you stalk Alchemy and notice a lot of requests for resin boogers and try going into the resin booger business as a supplement or instead. And this is obvious to you because you weren't covering your variable costs. Those are the things that change with the selling of each item, and since you make each item to sell each item, materials and time kind of creep in there for you. They create a bit of a pricing floor, below which it's not worth it to you to be felting boogers.
What do I mean by a FLOOR?
A level below which it is no longer worth it to you to sell your crap.

So when we go back to our friend, the fish swimsuit maker, if she's not moving her stock of 25 swimsuits, she'd better not be making any more, either. That would be dumb. When people talk about pricing things and say that they "can't charge enough to cover their materials and pay themselves a decent wage," I know this is an asshole response, but THEN DON'T MAKE IT ANYMORE! If you're doing it because you love the art, then you're going to have to consider love part of your salary. It goes in the bag with integrity. If you're trying to make a living, go play Lemonade Stand, keep track of your weekly and/or monthly sales, stalk people who sell similar items and their sales, and if you're still in the red, your magic highest number may still be red! Hopefully, it will be huge and gorgeous and positive and you can quit your day job and buy all 25 fish swimsuits. I hear that shop is having a clearance sale.


*This is assuming "Market research" involves barking at other dogs and pawing my face at 4 AM