For those of you that know me, you know that I am a resource teacher and do my jewelry and bead making part time. Four and a half years ago I stopped selling beads online after a tragic event sent my life into a tail spin. I won't launch into that story here because I couldn't possibly cover it in a paragraph or two. Once things started to slow down from that a year later, I just didn't have it in me to list anything anymore.
There was a time that I did very well selling beads and so so selling jewelry. I opened an Indiemade shop, but get virtually no business from it. It wasn't the site, it was me. I just didn't want to promote, take pictures, list, write descriptions, etc. to sell. The time has come for me to stop avoiding what I remember being a lot of work and get back into the bead business. I've probably written about this exact same topic before, but this time I am feeling the push to do so.
My goal is to retire at the end of the 2018 school year. I will be 58. I am in my 31st year right now. I have been lucky to have a job that I like for the most part. It's a little scary to think about not having the same income. I have all of these thoughts running through my head.....
What is something happens to my children or grandchildren and I cannot help? Are they going to be okay? What if this? What if that?
I need to STOP!!! and remember the advice that I always offer others. Most things in life are out of our control and it is rarely the things that we try to control that end up being something that we are faced with.
So, with my retirement goal in mind, I need to get ahead financially. I thought Handmade at Amazon was going to be the boost that I needed to start selling again. I do want to do this full time when I retire from teaching.
So, I signed up and was accepted. Well, it turns out since I sold a half dozen things on Amazon in 10 years, I have a seller account. It would not let me set up shop. I spent way too many hours on the phone and on the internet trying to take care of this glitch.....
.....only to find out from my friend Staci Lousie Smith, who, if you know her, you know that she knows the ins and outs of online anything, that they aren't taking beads and components at this time. Why the heck did they accept me?
They launched yesterday and sure enough I didn't see beads and components. I did see the number 43,000 or something close to that next to jewelry and I was like..... NO WAY! I cannot compete with that. Hopefully, I will be over all of my frustrations by the time Amazon decides to include components.
So today, I am hanging my head when I say that I am going to give in and start my Etsy store back up. I left Etsy as soon as they included manufactured items, and in all honesty, when I searched for ceramic beads just the other day I was a little appalled at what I was up against, but I am going to give it a shot again.
So, Etsy, here I come..... for a while anyhow. I will wait to see what happens on Amazon and maybe I will make the switch. But for now, I am motivated to start selling again.
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| assorted porcelain beads |
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| wood-fired stoneware beads |
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| porcelain beads with shino glaze |
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| porcelan beads pistachio shino glaze |
I also checked out examples of what you will see when I get started back up!
I hope that ceramic beads are still in style......
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