January 9, 2012

My jewelry business is akaCINDERS, and most of the people in the business call me Cinders (because I encourage it). I find it odd that of all the people I talk to on a daily basis, only one has asked my why Cinders. I guess if they know my real name they assume its just an endearing form of Cindy? There is really a reason for the tag Cinders.

For some reason, ever since I was a little girl, people like to turn Cindy, into Cinderella. When I was 6, I even found myself with a step mother and two step sisters (they used to be a little wicked, but are very nice now). So when I decided to open a jewelry shop on Etsy, I thought of Cinderella, and I thought of one of my favorite Hans Christian Anderson story The Tinderbox and I named it Cinderbox. That was the start of Cinders. It also had to do with recycling, I liked to reuse materials, so it was like creating from cinders. I liked that.

I had the most pleasant surprise today. Shortly after I finished my Monday blog, Life on Mars, (the one where I post all the terrible or bizarre things that happened to be the previous week) I got news that I had been featured in a blog. It was a lovely feature and really made my day. I also sold an Apron and a clutch, so that was good.

I have been considering my packaging for my flower jewelry. Packaging for the brick and mortars. I would have loved it to look like florist flower boxes. I would love for them to have windows and be eco friendly, but I'm afraid that would be too expensive or improbable. I thought that clear packaging might look like corsage boxes, but I knew they would have to be plastic and probably not recycled. Darn what a dilemma.

I was going to ask my team of indie seller friends what they thought of the possibilities. My online packaging wouldn't really work in shops. I did some searching online and found the perfect thing, clear plastic pillow boxes with a hang tab. I guess I can at least use recycled Kraft cardstock as backers and recycled Kraft stickers for labels on the packages. So I guess I made my own decision.

I sold enough today that I could buy 50 boxes to start my packaging, I'll have to buy the recycled papers later. I'm getting excited about the process.

As I haven't worked at all on product design, you can tell where my heart really is. I really do love my jewelry and hope I can find the right market for it, so that I can really make a living at it.

I just thought that I have a professional binding machine and plenty of rings. I can make little catalogs that I can ship or hand out with the jewelry samples to shops. have to plan those too. Maybe half sheet. They would need to fit in a small flat rate box, so that I can ship samples and catalog, fairly inexpensively.

Today was a very good day.