How to sell your handmade cards

By Georgina  |  5 Jan 2017 19:00:00

HOW TO SELL YOUR HANDMADE CARDS by Georgina

As a creative person, you will no doubt love the whole process of getting messy and actually making your greetings cards and will willingly absorb yourself into the whole creative process. But you will, most likely, feel intimidated at the prospect of sending your amazing creations out into the big worldwide marketplace for the first time, so here are some ideas and tips on how I approached it for the first time.

STEP ONE: WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE?

You must, must, must know who you are designing for, its no good hoping to successfully stock your wizard and witch cards in your local church sale now is it! So, I first started out by finding out who my audience should be..or put another way..finding out if people liked what I was creating, and the types of people who liked or disliked what I was doing.

I did this by giving cards away to friends and family and friends of friends, and waiting for their applause (or not) before moving on to step 2:

STEP TWO: APPROACH LOCAL BUSINESSES

Once you have confirmed that your friends and family like what you are producing, now is the time to approach your local businesses who have complimentary products for sale. For example, my cards originated as farm animal based so I approached local farm shops to see if they would like to stock my cards in their cafe's and gift shops for Christmas. They did! Result! They sold well which was brilliant and also meant that they asked for more stock the following year.

STEP THREE: SELL ONLINE

So whilst the above was going on, I was busy beavering away with promoting my sales online. Using www.Sellr.com as my ecommerce website provider, I was able to list my cards directly on to Facebook and also onto Ebay which made it super easy to track stock levels and see sales from all the places I was selling in one place. Sellr made it easy to list products and their images and gave me some really inspiring templates to choose from..and if you only have a limited amount of stock to sell its perfect as you can use it for FREE forever! Not even a 14 day trial like Shopify and EKM offers which essentially traps you in to using it, as by the time you have listed all your products and images and chosen your website template your trial is practically finished and you have to start paying..but not with Sellr.com And if i get bored with my current template I can just choose another one and don't have to worry about having to enter all my products again. Genious!

Another good tip is to start a Facebook Business Page, which will allow you to attract more admirers of your work and also to sell direct to them via the Facebook webshop

So In a nutshell you need to make sure you do the following:

• Learn who your audience is

• approach local shops and business with stock to sell

• set up an ecommerce website and list your products in marketplaces like Ebay

• promote your Facebook page

ENJOY THE CREATIVE PROCESS!

www.thehorseartist.co.uk