How to Sell Handmade Jewellery

Selling Your Handmade Jewellery

Many people start out their own jewellery-making businesses after learning to make jewellery - what begins as a hobby can become a sideline work-from-home business, and even a full time job. There are several ways to sell your own handmade jewellery. It can be sold through existing shops, although these will, of course take a cut of the profits, due to their own overheads. This might seem less profitable for you, but it's a great way to get started as an existing shop is an existing platform, with a ready-made customer base. Plus you will get quite immediate feedback about which of your designs are going to be the most popular.

Another popular way to sell your own jewellery is at craft fairs, where you pay a fee to take a stall and sell your handmade products. This has its pros and cons, too - business depends on how well attended the craft fair is, and how well publicised it has been by the organisers. However, you get to meet your customers, make your own sales pitch, and this personal approach can work very well.

Increasingly, many people are selling their handmade jewellery online. It's easy to sell through existing outlets such as eBay, and the more specifically handmade sites such as Folksy, DaWanda and Etsy. These allow you to set up your own online shop within them, which is great for people with little experience of making websites, or those whose budget doesn't extend to paying a professional web company to do it. These sites do charge a fee for using them, but it's a fairly low one.

If you want to create and host your own website but are a novice website builder, there are some template packages you can buy, the best of which I have seen is from mrsite.com.

Things to Remember

Can people find your website?
If you're selling your handmade jewellery online, from your own website, it's very important that people are able to find the website in order to buy from you. If you make amethyst bead bracelets, you ideally would like your site to appear in the Google search results when people search for "amethyst bead bracelets". The way to make this more likely to happen is make sure your website is properly Search Engine Optimised. This is not as complicated and scary as it sounds! You can either pay a professional to do it for you (look for individuals local to you, and small local web companies, not huge corporations or people who approach you with generic emails about how they can boost your search engine rankings) or read up on it yourself - it's easy once you know how...

Product Photos
Remember - people can't pick up, touch and see your products in real life. Imagine you've never seen the item that you're trying to sell. You need crisp, large photos, from several different angles and in good light, so the buyer can see exactly what the piece of jewellery looks like. I've seen so many people try to sell things with a tiny, blurry, dark photo - these just don't provide enough information for potenial buyers, and are very off-putting.

The best way to photograph jewellery is on a plain white background in natural light. It's also sometimes possible to get good results with a scanner if your jewellery is flat enough to fit into one, but generally photographs are best.

Things to Avoid!

There is a free website builder available called Wix, which appears to be the worst possible thing for building a website ever. It looks exciting, but websites I have seen which use this system are not user-friendly, really hard to navigate, and make it almost impossible for anyone to ever find your site in search engines. Avoid!

Benefits

One of the best things about selling your own handmade jewellery is that in my experience, people are always going to want to buy it. Even in a recession, something small such as a necklace or a bracelet is an ideal piece of inexpensive retail therapy. The handmade element is a big draw, too - a unique handmade brooch is much more appealing to a chainstore one, in my opinion.