Online Marketing for? or to? Potters.

I think online marketing is tough for potters.

I think we do it pretty well, but I notice some problems that we have that I don't think other folks have, especially those who are resellers. Resellers have a pretty straightforward deal, I have this thing, it's a cool thing and I can send it to you now at a fair price.

Potters seek out other potters, like no other group I can think of. We're very incestuous as a group, a huge number of the fans of our Facebook page are potters, I'm a huge fan of other potters Facebook pages. We just love to see what other clay people are up to.

Cone 6 Fake Ash with Cobalt or Runny Blue-Grey Coffee Mug?

Sometimes when I go to compose a post, I forget that I am sharing my story to more than the other potters. I'm telling a creative clay story for the people who are interested and want to buy things. The general public wants a story of a creative person, living a creative life and making beautiful things.They want a peek into the process and a glimpse of the dream. We should be selling to the people who say "bake" not "fire" Not the folks who know the terms Hare's Fur, Soda Fire, Oribe, or Cone 12 flat.

It took my wife about 10 minutes of looking through other potter's Etsy listing tags to figure out a major reason why some folks had more online sales than others.

The folks who had less sales were marketing to other potters, and while that is cool, potters like to buy pots too, once they get over their need to make it, not buy it. They talk about firing temperatures, type of clay, specific name of the glaze, all cool stuff to know if you are a potter talking to other potters. Or listing technical information for a show. Perhaps its not the most important thing when trying to address the general public. The general public searches for terms like "Brown and Blue Coffee Mug" while potters search for "Cone 10 Stoneware wood fired mug" Maybe we should include all those tags to get the full range of customer.

Potters, especially academic potters do themselves a disservice this way. Just like back in English Composition class, you need to know who your audience is.  Who are you talking to? Will they know the terms you are putting in that tag cloud?

Any thoughts on this? Share them in the comments. Are you a potter or a customer who loves pottery?

The Making of our Oak and Acorn Plates

An Oak Leaf and Acorn Plate by Rowan Rose and Charles Hughes of Hughes Pottery

 

 

 

Follow this link to our Facebook Fan Page to see step by step photos!

Did a Panda eat my store??

It's good to do what you love for a living, but only if it is a living. We've been living the dream.

The last couple of years, we at Hughes Pottery have been feeling pretty good about the way the economy has been treating us. 

While we have, like most of the US also been suffering in various ways, like a beautiful house we couldn't sell that was eating up over $1000 a month until we just couldn't do it anymore, we have also been experiencing a shift in our business practices that gave us a lot of hope for the future. Our business increased, while so many were losing jobs. People were buying more pottery. We don't know why. Here is an overview of where we came from.

4 Years ago, 100% of our sales came from doing various festivals and fairs around the country. This was pretty good and after expenses we got to keep about 50% of the retail sold. But sales were starting to decrease and in the middle of 3 years ago we knew there had to be some major changes.
My brilliant wife said "We need to diversify our income streams and keep more of what we sell!"

So we set out to do that. We stopped doing the lowest producing events, and started figuring out how to do online sales. We started stocking the bigger events with more work, and while we had a representative manage the distant events, we went to other smaller local events to keep the cash flowing. We also started looking for wholesale opportunities with local businesses, All of these changes started to make a difference, but the biggest one started to come to fruition in January of 2010. www.hughespottery.etsy.com.

We were at an even in MA, selling our wares, when suddenly my smart phone began chirping at me. Several sales had come through on Paypal. How awesome! Mavelous! Here we were at an event in MA making money, we had a rep in FL making money and suddenly we were also making money online! So my brilliant wife Rowan started poking around in the forums on Etsy and started paying a lot more attention to it. By the next month it had become a challenge to get more work up and see how well this online sales thing could work. It became amazing, we watched sales increased steadily until summer, when we really couldn't stock it as well, or pay as much attention to it because of all the summer shows and traveling.

After summer we started restocking the shop and sales started to increase again until we started thinking maybe..just maybe this could support us entirely and then we could pay off debts and take a vacation and have savings and stuff...but it turned out to only be a Christmas sales season fantasy...sales dropped again, but were steadily higher than the previous year. We made an extraordinary effort and doubled the stock available... no dramatic changes in sales, but at least we were not frantic to keep up anymore.

Then came summer.

My expectation: Sales would drop a little bit because it is summer..people are busy, people are doing things, people are buying at craft fairs and other outdoor festivals. However, I expected we would see a similar level of sales to the previous year, simply based on having a lot more available stock, more than double!

The reality: Sales plummeted in June and July, I am not sure what to expect from August. I sure as hell hope to see increases again in September.

Thankfully we have big events in August that traditionally do very well..hopefully enough to make up for June and July and lead us into September.

So what happened? There are several things we're looking at.

1) It's summer..it'll all be OK come fall.
2) Etsy has been going through a lot of changes, introducing some social networking features and changing a lot of things internally that could affect how many Etsy visitors are being exposed to our site.  Etsy also just recently got a new CEO..and while it's always exciting to have new leadership, it's also frightening. They could make things better..or horribly worse.
and
we've been reading in the Etsy forums about other people having drastic decreases in their normally steady summertime online sales. While we believe it, we don't know if it is a true trend. There is only limited information available to us, but the Etsy weather report indicates a 4% decrease in sales for June sitewide.

3) Two major changes from Google. One an algorithm change in the early spring, then what they called the Panda update. All the reading we've done indicates out shop is very compliant and shouldn't be ignored by the google bots.

In the end, we just don't know..but hope it will be back to normal soon. Our lives and livlihood depend on it.

If anyone has insight..please feel free to comment.

The Goblet King Prepares for WAR!

We're getting ready for War..The Pennsic War. This large goblet will be one of the centerpieces of our display. Wish us well, and if you have need of our pottery while we are at war, please visit our online store.

www.hughespottery.etsy.com

While we will be pretending to be in medieval times, we'll still be updating and checking in with pictures and updates from the war on our Facebook business page. Visit us there!