Make money with beads

Is There Room For You In The Beaded Jewelry Business?

2006-05-23T14:22:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked the question, "is the beaded jewelry market flooded?" In some businesses it is essential that you be one of the first in the market. No one has been able to compete with eBay for instance. But in other markets there is always room for new people.

There has always been a lot of competition in the jewelry market but the trick is to find the right place to sell your beaded jewelry. This will take research and open eyes, but it can be done. Always be looking for opportunities and you will begin to see them.

Look for fairs and bazaars. Ask your local boutiques if you can do a trunk show. Set up home parties. Explore the internet. There are opportunities to sell your jewelry out there. It is your job to find the ones that work for you.

Research Your Beading Business

2006-05-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

The most common mistake that people make when starting a business is not fully researching their market. People will start a business thinking that they are the only ones with the idea and then find out later that there is a lot of competition in their field.

It is like when you buy a new car and then begin to notice how many other people have the same car. Before we started selling beads online, Kay research other bead sellers for three months. She identified what seemed to work and what didn't work and then we started Pizazz Works online.

If you want to be successful, you must find out as much about the business that you are getting into before you do it. If you do your research up front, you will be a step ahead when you begin.

Turn Your Beading Passion into Money

2006-04-28T21:38:00.000-07:00

Passion is a very powerful emotion. It drives us to do things that we would not otherwise do. Passion is a force that is present in all successful ventures.

My wife and I work together in our business. She has a passion for design and I have a passion for business. It is easy to tell when the passion leaves a business. It is like a house that slowly deteriorate from neglect. Passion creates the drive to do the things necessary to succeed.

If you are passionate about your jewelry, you will drive yourself to make your products. You will do the research necessary to find the places to sell your jewelry. You will invest the money necessary to make your business grow.

Passion for beading is a key factor in making your business successful. Without passion, you will not do what is necessary to succeed. If you have it, the sky is the limit!

Selling Beaded Jewelry at Home Parties

2006-04-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

Home parties are an excellent way to sell your beaded jewelry. If you set it up right, it is a fun and relaxed way for people to buy from you.

I just received a request to exchange links with a website in the United Kingdom that is an excellent resource for anyone that wants to sell their jewelry at home parties. The author has written a very useful guide to how to successfully stage a home party to sell your goods. The information is free and will be helpful to anyone wishing to do home parties.

Her website address is: http://www.craft-selling-parties.com/

As I said, the owner of the website exchanged links with our website. If you have a website and would like to exchange links with our site Pizazz Works, you can click the link below:

More Secrets to Buying Beads

2006-04-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I mentioned some of the tricks that bead sellers use to make you think that you are getting a good deal. I mentioned that some sellers will marking up their beads so they can give you 50% off or call themselves wholesale and charge retail prices.

Another trick that sellers use is to sell the beads cheap and charge high shipping prices. You can especially see this on eBay auctions.

When you buy your bead supplies, calculate the real price with shipping included. Try to remember about what you paid before for similar items. The best way to get good prices on your beads is to compare with the price you paid before.

We started ONE Cent auctions on eBay last week and decided to charge the same shipping price as we charge for everything.

Where to Buy Your Beads

2006-04-14T12:10:00.000-07:00

One of the things that you have to do in business is find good sources for your supplies. You can purchase from your local bead store, bead shows, or online. One of the things that we saw when we were exhibiting at bead shows was that the beads in the "wholesale section", were the same price or higher than the beads in the retail section.

I talked with those dealers and they said that they exhibited in the Wholesale section because people thought that they would get a better deal in the wholesale section.

The key is that you should not assume that you are getting a good price just because something says wholesale. Also be careful about large discounts. Some dealers will raise their prices just to give you a bigger discount.

You really need to know what your net cost is for your beads. Just because you got them for 50% off, it doesn't mean you got the best price. The best thing to do is to remember what you have paid in the past and compare the final price with what you have paid before.

On our website, (www.pizazzworks.com) we try to have low prices all of the time and we don't raise the price of our items when we have our weekly sales.

Money for Your Beading

2006-04-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

Many times, a person will start a business and use personal credit cards to buy supplies. Starting a business by using credit is a common practice which if done responsibly is acceptable. There can be detrimental effects in using your personal credit cards to finance your business.

If you owe more than 50% of your credit limit on your personal credit cards, your credit score will go down. This can mean the difference in being able to get good interest rates when you purchase a house or car. A few point higher interest rate can be very costly on a large purchase.

The answer is to get business lines of credit or business credit cards. Usually if you have a business license, you will recieve offers for business credit. Even though you will put your social security number on the bussiness loan, it will not show up on your personal credit report. This can be a huge benefit to you if it will help you to keep your personal credit card balances below 50%.

My Favorite Tax Deduction for your Bead Business

2006-04-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

Since it is getting close to April 15th, I though that I would say something about the tax advantages of owning your own beaded jewelry business.

You can deduct most any expense that you have related to your business. Keep track of all of your expenses whether you know they are deductable or not and take them to a tax preparer or use a tax preparation software. You may be supprised at all of the possible deductions.

One of the best tax deductions is for the bussiness use of your vehicle. Keep a log book in your car and write down the starting and ending mileage everytime you use your car to sell your jewelry or pick up supplies or anytime you drive for business related reasons.

The deduction changes every year but it is over .40 per mile, so it is a deduction that can really add up!

How to Price Beaded Jewelry Repairs

2006-04-07T17:45:00.000-07:00

Most of the time I talk about selling your beaded Jewelry, but I recently received a letter about repairing beaded jewelry for others. The lady was asking me how to price her repair work. Repair work is something that you can decide to do or not, but you can make money repairing beaded jewelry.

Usually people will ask you to repair their jewelry is they see you at a show. At our bead store we have people asking us to repair jewelry often. If you are not ready to give an answer as to how much you are going to charge, you will probably get caught off guard the first time some asks you to do a repair job.

My suggestion is that you should not be afraid to charge a very decent hourly wage to fix someone's jewelry. When you are fixing jewelry for someone, you are not able to make your own new jewelry and your time is valuable. Estimate the time that it will take you to do the job and multiply by the wage that you are worth. If you have to use some of your own supplies, you should make a profit on them also.

You probably will not be doing repairs full time, and it will be a disruption to what you would normally be making, but it is a sure thing and it will help your cash flow.

Learn How to Bead

2006-04-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

I recently received this letter:

I wanted to thank you, Kay and your team for the fabulous assortment in beads and, especially for the idea gallery.
Through the years I noticed that every designer I encountered has been very reluctant to share ideas, so Kay has been a breath of fresh air to me! Thanx so much for sharing your designs and ideas with me, I love you guys for it!

The fact is that most designers don't want to share their ideas. Maybe this is because they don't have very many ideas. We share our ideas because people grow and develop their talents by observing what others do. You can come up with new designs by combining things that you have seen from other designers and adding new twists.

If you go to college to learn design, you will be studying what others have done. You can also do this by studying what people around you are doing.

If you are interested in more beading and selling information from Kay, you can view previews of her DVD series at http://www.designerkay.com/video/

Play to Your Audience

2006-04-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

Last night, Kay and I went to a large music festival in Tempe, AZ to see some very popular bands. Three out of the four bands that we saw were excellent. They played familiar songs laced with new and some less familiar songs. The forth group played none of their hit songs for the first hour of the concert and did their own thing. The person that I look forward to seeing the most, gave the worst performance I have every seen.

There is a great lesson here, especially for artistic people. The young musical artist that we went to see, decided to do what he felt like doing. I have to say, I have not seen so many people leave a concert before the headliner was done playing.

To be successful selling your beaded jewelry, you have to balance "doing your own thing", with doing what you know people will buy. This is not always an easy channel to navigate. Some artists say, "I am going to do what I want to do", and don't recognize the need to understand their audience. If you want to be successful, you have to understand what your audience wants, and give it to them. If you don't, you will be a starving artist.

For more information about making money with beads, go to: http://www.pizazzworks.com

Have a successful attitude

2006-03-31T12:12:00.000-08:00

If you are a pessimist, owning your own business is not for you. A business is most often a roller coaster ride with its ups and downs, twists and turns. Usually people don't realize this until they have their own business.

Sometimes the only thing that will keep you going is hope. I believe that a necessary ingredient to a successful business is optimism. When you take your beaded jewelry to a new craft show and don't even make your booth fee, you need a reason to continue.

If you are not prepared ahead of time to accept the fact that there will be ups and downs, you will easily be discouraged. When you try to sell your jewelry and it does not sell, you need to understand that that is just a part of doing business.

Most importantly, learn from your experience. We can learn more from disappointment than from our successes. When things are going well, we tend not to change. Change is good in business so accept that everything is not always going to work out but in the long run, if you stay positive, and make the necessary changes, you will succeed.

Sell your Beaded Jewelry to Stores

2006-03-30T12:40:00.000-08:00

Here is a question that I received about pricing items to sell to a store:

I have an opportunity to show some of my pieces to a retailer. She deals in what I would call the "higher end" of clothing and accessories and is located in a primarily tourist town. My question then is, how do I determine a price when selling direct. She has already told me to remember that she will have to "double" my price in order for her to make a profit. I understand the consigning arrangement (I have sold several pieces in a local store) and I believe I understand how to price for craft shows ( I will have my first booth in June ) but have no idea how much of a profit margin I should have when it comes to selling direct.

Answer:
When you sell to a retail store, the goal is to have your items sell through that store. Some stores double the price they buy items for and some triple the wholesale price. It is important to know what mark up the retail store is going to put on your items. The best thing to do is to work backwards from the price that your item should sell for in their store.

If your jewelry would sell for $100 in their store, and they are doubling the price of your item, then you would price your item at $50. If this gives you a markup that you can live with, and your items move through their store, then everyone is happy.

The most important factor is the price that the item will sell for. If the store buys from you and can't sell your pieces at the price that they have to mark them at, you will be making a one time only sale.

Let the store buyer help you determine the best retail price for their store and if you can make money at 50% of that price, then you have found the right price. As much as we would like to price things by a formula, pricing is more of an art than a science.

Be sure to check back with the store to see how things are selling and to show them new pieces. We always did a guarantee program with store that purchased from us. If they could not sell a piece, we would exchange it for something else. This makes it much easier for the store to purchase your items.

What to do to Sell Your Beads

2006-03-28T13:21:00.000-08:00

Like most things in life that are worthwhile, selling your beads takes planning. I will be more specific about things that you need to plan in future Blogs, but you need to start lining up places to sell your beaded jewelry now.

The summer and fall seasons offer many good opportunities to sell your beaded jewelry. Look for art and craft fairs and bazaars in your area and even out of your area if you don't mind traveling.

Space in most of these summer and fall events must be reserved in advance and if you don't line them up now, it may be too late. I just thought you might need a little push to get prepared for the new season.

Happy beading!

Keep Your Silver Beads Looking Good

2006-03-26T17:40:00.000-08:00

One of the most asked questions that I get is, "How do I keep my sterling silver beads looking good before I sell my jewelry?"

If you are selling your jewelry, it is very important that you keep it looking new. Sterling silver tarnishes due to oxidation. This means that the tarnish comes from the contact of oxygen with the surface of the metal.

To keep your jewelry looking good, you can try to keep it from tarnishing by putting it into a plastic bag that contains a tarnish inhibitor or clean it before you sell it.

We have found that for most sterling pieces, Hagerty Silversmith's Spray Polish works very well. You can find it a your local hardware store. You spray it on and after it dries, wipe it off. For hard to reach places you can use a toothbrush to polish the silver.

People love Beads, But You Need More

2006-03-22T07:30:00.000-08:00

Here is a recent email that I received from one of our bead customers:

Having been in business for too many years to mention, I've seen many
changes which have been caused by the bottom line, profit margins, etc. (and I
do understand them, just don't like them) which have, in many cases, made
customer service non-existent (a prime example is trying to reach a live person
at a business). I think good customer service is extremely important and
if I have to make a choice between 2 suppliers the good customer service
wins every time without question.

Beads are a great media to make jewelry but customer service is essential. To sell more, the customer may not always be right but they have to win.

Find the right place to sell your Jewelry

2006-03-20T13:02:00.000-08:00

I get email from all over the world from people that are making money with beads by making beaded jewelry and selling it. That does not mean that what you make will sell where you want to sell it. You may find that you can sell at an in home show but not at a craft show. You may want to sell wholesale to a store but you can't make enough money.

Where you sell your jewelry makes a big difference in what price you can sell it for. Once you have found a good place to sell your items, concentrate on making jewelry in a variety of price ranges for that market.

Try different avenues to sell your jewelry. The same thing does not work for everyone but you should be able to find a place that works for you.

Latest Bead Fashion Trends

2006-03-17T18:33:00.000-08:00

I mentioned a few days ago the we had talked to a lady from Mexico that had just returned from the Milan fashion trend show. She gave us the inside scoop on what the fashion experts are predicting for this year.

Besides what I already mentioned in the previous "Fashion Trend Secrets" Blog, she said that brown tones are going to be "in" this year. Maybe our customers already knew this because we have been selling a lot of Bronzite Beads lately.

Pricing your beaded jewelry

2006-03-16T11:25:00.000-08:00

I am often asked about how to price ones beaded jewelry.

The best thing to do is to compare your jewelry with what else is available and price yours accordingly. You can start with this type of a strategy and then add up your material costs plus labor and see what type of a mark up you are getting. If you are not getting at least a three time mark-up over your cost of materials and labor, then you might consider changing something.

The other way to figure out what price to charge is to start with your cost of materials and labor and then marking that up X number of times. This is a common way to figure price, but I believe that it is flawed because it does not take into consideration the uniqueness of the design or the market value of the piece.

You can find more articles about making money with beads at http://www.pizazzworks.com.

Increase your web beaded jewelry sales

2006-03-14T11:17:00.000-08:00

Since we do a lot of sales online, I am always interested in ways to increase our search engine rankings. Here is a snippet of an article about links:

Having too many irrelevant links could harm your website's visibility in the search engines. What is meant by this is having links from websites that have no relation to yours. An example of this would be a site about cars linking to another site about medicine (unless the sites are reputable and have a good reason for the link i.e. there is a relationship made between cars and medicine).

It is good to get other websites to link to yours. This will help your ranking. The trick is that you need to screen the sites that you want to link with.

We have set up a reciprocal link area on our website which has a Google PageRank of 4 if you would like to exchange links with us, click here.

You can sell your beaded jewelry

2006-03-13T12:48:00.000-08:00

As someone who is trying to make a small business work, it is always good to have encouragement and see that it can work. Here is a letter that I recieved from one of our bead customer.

"I just wanted to tell you & your wonderful staff what a pleasure it is & has been working with you. All the great, luscious beads you have & that I have purchased & made my gorgeous things from ( with a lot if ideas from beautiful Kay), have been the focus of the sales in my new jewelry biz.

I am doing so wonderfully in my biz here in Florida, I just wanted to send a special thank you.

... just wanted to say thank you for having the rocks that have helped me get to the status I have reached in my biz.

I look forward to checking your site for new & gorgeous inspirations every day."

This person sells her jewerly at art fairs and a small at-home shop.

Fashion Trend Secret

2006-03-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

Being in the bead business, we come in contact with many people with like interests. Kay and I were recently at the Tucson Gem and Mineral show and met a lady from Mexico who just got back from Milan Italy. She was attending a show that previewed the new fashions.

She also told us about a program that she buys (at a cost of about 6K) that tells her what the fashion trend is going to be. According to her, Black and White are going to be in this year. She said that the the Russian influence would be big in the spring and the African influence would follow in the fall.

To make money with beads, you should be aware of the current fashions. Watch the fashion magazines, movies, and television. It is always good to offer a variety of colors, but it helps to offer the current fashion colors.

You can always see what's new at Pizazz Works by clicking the What's New section.

Cool Carved Beads

2006-03-10T14:13:00.000-08:00

The main thrust of this blog is to help people to make money with beads. Living in Tucson, we have a great oportunity to see the latest things in the bead world every February. Part of making money with your beading projects is to be unique. I have to share what I think were the coolest new beads that we found at the Tucson Gem and Mineral show this year.

We found very cool carved butterfly beads, hollow twisted cylinders, figure eights, and flower beads.

It is important for you as a beaded jewelry designer to make unique items if you want to recieve top dollar for your items. You can always find new design ideas and new beads at http://www.pizazzworks.com.

Selling your Beaded Jewerly

2006-03-09T07:54:00.000-08:00

Uncomfortable with Selling

The article above is a good article on feeling uncomfortable about the selling process in general. Most artists and beaders feel this way and are not the best sales people. If you are passionate about your beads, others will be infected by your enthusiasm too and you will make sales.

Make money with beads

2006-03-08T21:31:00.000-08:00

My wife and I made and sold our jewelry and other craft products to chain stores, boutiques, and individuals for a decade. My wife appeared on the Discovery Channel demonstrating products that she created for the craft industry. We learned a lot of things and I would like to share what we learned by trial and error with other so that they may succeed.

Making and selling your own jewelry can be fun and rewarding, but there are a lot of things to consider. I will do my best to shed light on the secrets that will make your experience making and selling beaded jewelry profitable.

We publish two newsletters a week to give beaders free information on beads that you can preview at http://cinews.pizazzworks.com.

If you love beading, check out the newsletters.