Happy New Year!

Hello! As expected I was insanely busy in November, it was a huge success so thank you very much for all of your orders before Christmas!

I've been very quiet for the last month as I closed my shop early in December, so the hubby and I could jet off to Jamaica for our second honeymoon! It was amazing and I can highly recommend it to anyone who loves sun, sea, and rum!

Anyway... I'm now back in full swing, and I have lots of ideas for 2016 that I can't wait to make and share. 

To kick off the new year, I'm having a sale! Lots of charm jewellery is reduced by up to 30%, so what are you waiting for? Head on over now!

Early Bird Christmas Discount

November is by far the busiest month of the year, I usually have to close my order books so I can process the vast number of orders in time for Christmas.

So to encourage you to order in advance, I'm offering an Early Bird Discount, which is only valid until Midnight on the 1st November 2015, so get your orders in NOW!

This discount code can be used on my Website and in my Etsy Store, and on my full range including my Birthday and Birthstone Jewellery, Themed Charm pieces and Bridesmaid and Flower Girl Gifts, no minimum spend.

Have a browse in my shops below:

Gifts for Teachers and Students

I've been updating my gifts for teachers and students, this is the first set of designs that feature my new script initial charms! 

Quietly, and behind the scenes I've been building my website shop, and eventually I will update all of the designs in my Etsy shop too.

Last year my teacher gifts were very popular, and I'm hoping this will be repeated this year :)

So what's new?

Book Necklaces! I've wanted to launch these for a while now, and end of the academic year seemed like a perfect time! A great way to say thank-you to a teacher, and it also doubles as a gift for someone who loves to read!

New cute owl charms, and owls combined with apples make a lovely teacher gift!

Something for the students!

Graduating is a big deal! It marks the end of years of hard work and success, my mortar board necklace is the perfect way to mark the graduation occasion!

As always, my student and teacher gifts are available in my Etsy shop, and they are also available on the FunkyPinks website, which will be officially relaunched later this year.

May Wedding Event

To celebrate my recent wedding, I'm running a promotion on my Wedding Jewellery in May. 

When you purchase any of my selected jewellery, you will get personalised gift boxes absolutely free! (Usually starting from £4.99)

Flower Girl Jewellery

I have two main designs specifically for flower girls at the moment; daisies and roses. 

Daisies were one of the first designs I launched last year, and I introduced roses for valentines day this year. Both styles are available with glass pearl beads and with birthstones.

Bridesmaid Jewellery

The jewellery I have for bridesmaids can also be lovely gifts for flower girls. M main themes are birds, hearts and my favourite are the cute couples charms!

I have also included my snowflake jewellery in the promotion, these are one of my best sellers and would be great for a Winter Wedding, so order now to get your free gift boxes.

Gift Boxes

The gift boxes can be personalised to say anything you'd like, I also have some standard greetings and sayings that can be personalised with different names.

These boxes will only be free during May, so make sure you get your orders in by the end of the month!

We Got Married!

I am now a married lady! I've taken the last month off from FunkyPinks so that I could enjoy my beautiful wedding and fabulous Honeymoon!

Our wedding was truly the best day of my life, we had an absolute ball and shared it with all of our wonderful family and friends.

It was all very glam of course! The theme was 'Woodland' and my gorgeous mum made most of our decorations, I'm going to be writing a separate blog about it all in the next few weeks, as I know a lot of brides-to-be can take a lot of inspiration from it all, just like I did with others!

May Wedding Promotion
And FunkyPinks is open for business again! To celebrate my wedding I'm running an promotion this month.

Throughout May, any orders of selected Wedding Jewellery will get personalised gift boxes absolutely free!

Here's a picture of the boxes I gave to my own Bridesmaids on my wedding day, all o their jewellery was handmade by me of course!

I made them all leaf charm jewellery, matching the colours of their dresses; always one to stand out, I had four different colours!

Green, pink, blue and lilac. The colour scheme ran through the entire wedding and it all looked fabulous! 

I gave my girls sterling silver jewellery, with diamante leaf charms, which added a lovely bit of sparkle to their outfits.

I am planning to add these charms to my wedding jewellery range in a few weeks time!


Watch this space!

Charming Earrings

For a long time I've been wanting to launch a full range of charm earrings to match all of the jewellery in my shop, I've struggled to do it, partly through procrastination but also because I always found earrings difficult to photograph.

I think I've finally cracked it though, and today I finished uploading 12 new listings to my Etsy Shop.

Roses, Flowers and Daisies

I have three types of flower earrings to match my Bridesmaid and Flower Girl Jewellery sets; so now you can get bracelets, necklaces and earrings in all three styles.

The flowers also match my Mother's Day jewellery.

Birds, Hearts and Butterflies

These charms have been popular for a long time, I use the birds in a lot of my jewellery so it made sense to offer matching earrings! I've always used the cute butterflies in my Birthday Jewellery, and the hearts have been popular since I launched then in February.

Elephants, Owls and Deer

Elephants and owls are already available in my shop, and I will be launching some new woodland animal charms in the next few weeks. I love these cute deer charms, they remind me of Bambi!

Bicycles, Paw Prints and Swans

I also have some new charms that I'm previewing, eventually I will be offering bracelets and necklaces with these charms, watch this space!

Gift Boxes Galore!

I love nothing more than sending out my jewellery pieces in cute gift boxes. I've spent most of last year trying different types of boxes, and I found a real love for brown 'kraft' styles; I felt they had a more of a 'handmade' crafty feel to them.

I wanted to personalise them or add to them in some way so they looked a little less boring! My jewellery has a lot of different themes, and I wanted my boxes to match them; but I needed them to be easy to make so I didn't end up spending more time on the boxes than on the jewellery!

I started to experiment with ink stamping, I used some for my Christmas wrapping and I found them really easy to make, and there are literally hundreds of rubber stamps you can get your hands on! 

I started with my Birthday Jewellery and found a gorgeous 'Happy Birthday' ink stamp from Skull & Crossbuns:

So now all of my Birthday Jewellery will come in these cute boxes, in a fancy gift bag.

My Flower Girl Jewellery boxes are my favourite!

I make all of them myself, and stamp them by hand. I've even been clever enough to make a video (something new I'm trying!)

I still have personalised boxes, which can be made up with any message or design! I have some boxes for my new Mother's Day bangles, which are a new product this month.

All of my Jewellery is for sale on my Etsy site: www.funkypinks.etsy.co.uk

How I've Grown My Etsy Business

Happy New Year everyone! Here's to 2015 - I can tell it's going to be a big one!

2014 has been so amazing for me and my business, it's become so much more than I had imagined and originally planned three years ago. I had to make a decision, did I want FunkyPinks to be a hobby I dabbled in every now and then; or did I want this to grow into a successful commercial business I could make a real profit from?

If you look back on my blog you'll see that this time last year I re-branded my business and changed my product offering, which was a bit daunting for me at the time, but I felt it was a risk worth taking.

My New Branding

At the beginning of the year I set myself a business goal - I wanted to achieve a total of 365 orders on Etsy averaging out one order a day. This felt like a realistic goal at the time, as in 2013 I racked up 112 orders.

What actually happened stunned me!

I took a massive 1,308 orders for the whole of 2014! Whilst some small businesses may scoff at this number, I'm incredibly proud of it; Especially as this is a part time business I run when I'm not doing my day job. 

There's been many a night when I've worked 9-5 to then sit down and work through the days orders to get them shipped out on time! Some days demand became so high I had to close my shop to new orders so I didn't get too far behind!

Even though I have well over 1000 orders, this doesn't actually reflect the amount of individual jewellery pieces I've made, as well as individual pieces I also sell a lot of sets, so one order could amount to 6 pieces, for example.

I've actually made over 1,500 individual necklaces and 800 bracelets over the course of the year, each one made to order and to individual specifications!

Set of Three Sister Necklaces are my most popular set!

I've read a lot of 'how to sell more on Etsy' blogs, which all have great advice and guidance to improve sales numbers, and I've implemented many of these ideas into my business which has definitely contributed to my success.

I wanted to share some of my own thoughts and experiences of selling on Etsy, what I've explored, and the results I've had. These things are not going to apply to every business on Etsy, but may give someone food for thought to help them!

Making my Business more Commercial - As I work a full time job as well as my business, I don't have the time to sit and create one off pieces and be able to market them successfully enough to make a reliable profit. I shifted my designs from one off pieces to personalised charm jewellery, and this has provided me with a steady stream of orders for the same design, but in a different colour or style. It's means I can manage my time more productively.

I used to class myself as a 'craft business' and whilst I do make each piece by hand I wouldn't call myself a 'crafter'. I'm a business woman (entrepreneur if you will), my priority is making my invested time worth it financially.

I keep my creative thirst at bay by designing new pieces and my website, I love building my brand through my packaging and graphics.

Improving Product Photographs - I've vastly improved the images I use to market my products, this was the trickiest part for me, it has taken me a few years to get them right, and I still struggle to take that perfect picture! Few things put me off buying something online more than a poor quality photograph! I also wanted my photographs to have a 'style', something that would be instantly recognisable to customers who know my branding.

Old

New

Improving the Quality of my Etsy Listings - Again, there is a lot of information online about improving your item listings to get them higher up on search pages. The most reliable source is always Etsy itself: https://www.etsy.com/uk/help/article/247

Etsy changed their search algorithm in the last year, and sellers were complaining in the forums that they were not getting as many views in their shop, probably because they hadn't changed anything on their listings. It's good to keep in touch with the changes, what they mean, and how to change your listings to enable your listings to rank higher in searches.

My top tip is to monitor your stats page, work out what phrases people are using to find your listings on Etsy, and use these specific phrases in your titles, tags and descriptions for maximum impact.

I invested in the blugrin application called Betsi. 

It allows you to bulk edit your Etsy listings in a single click, which is essential for effectively managing a high number of individual listings in your shop. They have a free 'Lite' version but I would recommend paying the monthly subscription to be able to edit tags and variations.

The app can be downloaded here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/apps/262788684/betsi-the-ultimate-bulk-batch-editing

Exploring New Markets - Bridesmaid and Flower Girl gifts were my best selling products in the Summer, I only really had two designs that I marketed, and I sold out three times in three months. This year, I'm going to launch several new designs aimed at this market in order to increase my slice of this very lucrative pie!

I am by no means an Etsy expert but it really works for me, and enables me to run a thriving business alongside my day job. The dream is to make this business my full time job, I'm still working on it!

Would you like to open your own store on Etsy?
Click the link below to get started and get 40 listings for free!

http://etsy.me/1rjvpLw

I'm famous!

I'm super excited this week as my jewellery has been featured in 'Make and Sell Jewellery' magazine!

I'm a regular subscriber to this fab magazine, (a must for any budding jewellery maker!) So when they asked if I would like to be featured in their regular 'Etsy Edit' section I jumped at the chance! <br>

I felt very honoured to have been asked to be featured. I didn't expect a sudden wave of new sales considering my audience would likely be competitors; for me it was more about being recognised by my peers. The handmade jewellery business sector is heavily saturated, and standing out from the crowd can be a difficult thing to do!

It also made me have to get new headshots of myself (something I was dreading!) and so my other half had to take endless photos of me until I was completely happy with them! It was a tiresome job as I'm very rarely happy with photographs of myself as I'm sure most people are!

My birthstone jewellery is available to buy in my Etsy shop: www.funkypinks.etsy.com

Coming soon to my website too!

Christmas Gift Wrapping

To build on my personalised gift boxes, I'm launching some new gift boxes for Christmas.

I slightly over did it on the ribbon front (you know how much I love variety!) I have four different style of ribbon to choose from!

I'm also trying out some new pillow shaped gift boxes, decorated with ribbon too! If I like these then I might replace my standard gift boxes!

 

Most of my jewellery is currently for sale in my Etsy shop, and the full range is on the FunkyPinks website!

Birthstone Jewellery is Here!

I'm so excited to finally be launching birthstone jewellery! Since I started making jewellery a few years ago I wanted to work with birthstone crystals, but couldn't justify the investment at the time.

After such a busy Summer with my bridesmaid and flower girl jewellery, I decided to take the plunge and try out a few designs to see how popular they would be, and I soon found out they were very popular!

Simple Birthstone Charm Jewellery

I've started with some simple designs, and gradually I will introduce different styles and mix the birthstones with my other charms, and cater for different budgets. 

Simple Birthstone Bracelets

I've opted for the Swarovski birthstone crystals, as they fit perfectly with the charms I currently offer. I want to expand my 'Birthday Jewellery' range, as I'm constantly being asked to make custom orders for birthday necklaces and bracelets in different styles!

Here's a peek at what I've been working on!

Hand Stamped Jewellery

Stamping is another skill I've been wanting to try my hand at (literally!) as you can see from the picture above, I'm going to be using small silver tags to stamp initials into, this will provide an additional option to my standard silver plated initial charms.

Brand new to FunkyPinks! Hand-stamped Initial charms

New Gift Boxes

I wanted to present my birthstone jewellery slightly differently to the rest of my jewellery, so I have designed a card insert for the gift box that each piece will be sent with.

The card features the corresponding month, the gem stone that the crystal represents, and the attributes.

Birthstones and their meanings:

January - Garnet - Faith, Truth & Grace

February - Amethyst - Peace, Protection & Tranquillity

March - Aquamarine - Strength, Hope & Creativity

April - Diamond - Innocence, Courage & Health

May - Emerald - Love, Success & Happiness

June - Alexandrite -Charity, Faith & Peace

July - Ruby - Nobility, Contentment & Enthusiasm

August - Peridot - Happiness, Luck & Success

September - Sapphire - Wisdom, Serenity & Truth

October - Rose Quartz - Hope, Purity & Health

November - Topaz - Fidelity, Courage & Serenity

December - Zircon - Success, Luck & Prosperity

Birthstones, months and their cards

Most of my birthstone jewellery is currently for sale in my Etsy shop, and the full range is on the FunkyPinks website!