Spirit Dancer Art

Just a quick update as I have begin packing for my upcoming trip to Vegas for the annual Glass Art Convention and wanted to see if I could blog from my phone. I look forward to my second glass convention and will let you know how it goes.

I just completed my 1st home show of 2009 & I am happy to say it was a success in many ways. In order to market my wares, I have retailers that carry my jewelry line & I also participate in a number of juried art shows. At some point I will also sell on-line but there are many mental hoops I need to jump thru before I am ready to do so. If a customer emails me directly I will work with them to find them the perfect piece of jewelry. For now, that has worked just fine.

However, since I began this business, I have also marketed my jewelry thru doing home shows. I always find them to be fun, relatively stress-free events. Set-up is minimal compared to setting up a booth for a show, and the risk of shoplifting is extremely low. Plus, there is always a friendly crowd, most of whom are in the buying mood.

But most of all I enjoy doing home shows because most hostesses opt to donate their cut of the sales to a worthy cause. Some, of course, want to use their credit toward merchandise & that is just fine by me. However, many choose to donate their portion of the sales to a worthy charity, such as an American Cancer Society Relay for Life team.

I always leave these shows feeling like a win-win. I have made some sales, people have walked away with new jewelry either for themselves or for a gift, and a worthy organization has just been helped as well.

I try to use the slower months of the year to work “behind the scenes” on my business. Sticking with that theme, today I attended a marketing class offered by the PA Guild of Craftsmen in Lancaster, PA.

As an MBA, I have had a good deal of business theory exposure, but I figured it never hurts to have a refresher & possibly learn something new. Plus, this class was geared especially to artisans & crafters which is a unique marketing subset.

I thought today’s class was interesting & left perhaps not necessarily learning a lot of new material, but having my suspicions confirmed/affirmed when it comes to marketing art to the general public.

Especially in the tough economic times we are currently in, there is a definite hurdle to jump to get people to want to open their wallet and invest in handmade, American-made craft.

In my case, I am lucky because my price point is such that it allows folks to still splurge in smaller ways versus having to dip deeply to invest in, say, a legacy painting.

Perhaps I am an eternal optomist, or perhaps it is just the sunny day we had, but I do hope that with spring will come a new sense of confidence in the economy & a greater willingness of the public to once again invest in American handicrafts.

In the meantime, I will use this winter lull to brush up on business skills, work thru the necessary paperwork that comes with managing a business, and best of all experiment with the kiln.

On that note, the kiln is fired up now & I look forward to seeing the final result in the morning.

Hello World – My wonderful web designer uploaded Word Press for me onto my website so I have now moved into the 21st century and can blog to my heart’s content. It may take me a bit to come up the learning curve but I look forward to beginning to let you know what is going on in my world of creating fused dichroic glass jewelry. I will just need to learn to switch my brain from artist mode to cyber mode, but I look forward to beginning to walk down this new path. Stay tuned for more updates.