Leslie Wind is a both a friend and a client. She is well-known on Cape Ann for her beautiful, hand-crafted metalwork in silver, gold and bronze. Unlike many artisans who make jewelry Leslie's pieces are not simply glued and wired together, they are hand-forged with fire and metal to produce some of the most unique and interesting pieces of jewelry I have ever seen. Leslie has had a web site for many years but the majority of her sales came from her own shop or by selling her work through the shops that belong to other area merchants. This is fine but Leslie always knew the world was waiting for her designs. 
Two years ago we began the process of re-designing her web site to show her latest offerings most of which were inspired by the current popularity of knitting and crocheting. Leslie had begun creating incredibly unique shawl pins but, of course, she knew that she had to market them far beyond Cape Ann. She began her own blog, a feature that I frequently recommend to clients trying to attract attention to their web sites. More about this in another blog entry. But she also began what she called “mining the internet”. In the evening she often spent hours surfing the internet for blogs and web sites that were of interest to fiber artists. She made posts to blogs telling them about her shawl pins and she emailed the owners of knitting businesses and asked if they were interested in exchanging links and information. Her business perked right up. That is when I suggested she add a PayPal Shopping Cart to her site.
The advantage to a PayPal cart was that it was versatile without much expense. Shoppers can use their own PayPal accounts or they can use any major credit card to make purchases and the cost to Leslie is on a per-sale basis saving her the upfront costs and monthly fees that a lot of credit card companies charge. The improvement in her sales was almost immediate.
“It's so exciting,” she told me. “I log into my PayPal account every morning and there's money there. I just print out the shipping order, package up the pieces and send them off.”
She found the more she “mined the internet”, especially visiting the blogs of fiber artists, the more business came her way. She developed a highly unique new design --- her Cable Needle Necklace™ -- which she patented and formed a partnership with a fellow blogger to market. Her sales have bee increasing steadily.
Yesterday she told me something exciting. “My sales are up 30% so far this year,” Leslie said, “all because of my internet sales. When it came time to pay my house taxes this year I had the money ight there in my PayPal account. I'm so excited.”
Leslie has done a great job both by creating unique products and by marketing herself using the internet as a marketing partner. And by keeping her web site active, with new designs and a means for people to order instantly, she has substantially increased her profits. It's no secret that marketing is a tough business for anyone but with ingenuity, a little effort, some creativity, and making use of tools that are affordable and easy to implement, anyone with a product to sell can increase their sales. Valentine-Design is here to help.
