Thousand Up!!

   After many years selling the majority of my beads from my Ebay shop, it was only last year that I decided to concentrate on building my shop on Etsy into my main source of income, it was going to mean hard work and many long hours at my torch but was surely going to be worth all the effort.
   At this time I had been seriously thinking of giving up my Ebay shop, their selling charges had gradually risen and the shop rent was not cheap, ok on a good month it was fine but if you had a bad month of sales then it really could hit your profits. So after a few evenings research and checking numbers and pricing I felt it was time for a change. The first job was to clear out my Etsy shop of old stock and start to list nice fresh new sets and focal beads, which was quite enjoyable, to be honest. Next move was to jump in at the deep end and close my bead shop on Ebay, this was a big decision and one I thought long and hard about, but money wise I knew I had to do. I could and will still sell odd sets on Ebay but I wasn't making enough money to warrant having a shop, there was the worry of maybe losing customers who would think I had given up making beads but with nice new business cards I was sure that problem was solved and they would find the Etsy shop.
https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/pebbledreams
   So within a few days, the Ebay shop was no more and the Etsy shop was going to get most of my attention, it was a fresh start yet a move with big risks.
   I often set myself targets in life and this was another such time, but this time the targets were set rather high and there was no expectation of seeing them reached in the new future. Firstly my aim was to reach a target of 500 items listed in the shop, these would include bead sets, focal beads and spacer bead sets. From past experience, I know that the bigger the selection of beads on sale the better, customers love a wide choice giving them more chance of finding the beads they need to work with. Secondly, I wanted to reach a thousand sale orders, not a thousand items sold but orders received, this was really a bit silly as I had up until then only had a couple of hundred orders and I was guessing this target would be a long time coming.
   Well now after a hell of a lot of hard work there are well over 600 items listed in the shop and yesterday saw my one-thousandth order, to say I'm over the moon is an understatement, I'm really proud of myself, as we Ashwell lads would say, "it took balls" but the boy did it. This just goes to show how hard work, dedication and belief can produce the goods and this now means I have a good solid base on which to build on, with the use of social media and working to a good solid standard I hope I can move forward. Now I see my beads used by some very special and talented jewellery designers, designers from all around the world and that really does make this old bead maker happy, it's all I've ever wanted and if I can continue to form beautiful interesting beads from molten glass then I'll be happy spending the rest of my days in my little bead world.

   On the bead side of things again I've been mixing glass to produce some unique one-off spacer sets, the "Toffee Cream" spacers as seen above being my favourite. I think most bead makers should spend a few hours each week mixing glass it's relaxing, interesting and throws up some great results.