by Rutherford Marx

Created on: July 29, 2008   Last Updated: August 14, 2011

When I was a small child, I used to watch my mother sit for hours laboring over tiny pieces of art she created with beads and thread. As my motor skills improved, she gave me projects of my own to complete and over time I mastered more complex techniques. Eventually, I made my own designs and began to sell them. It was then that the cold, cruel reality of the retail industry seeped into what I had once considered a pleasant world of creative production.

I realized that there is a lot of jewelry in the world and it takes not only creative talent, but also a strong knack for business to peddle luxury items. Business is one field I feel myself to be particularly handicapped in and my hope of making a living off of my craft started to crumble. Before I gave it up for good, however, I put a number of pieces on consignment at a few local shops. Pieces sold here and there, but I found that the most important aspect of selling my merchandise was staying in contact with the shop owners themselves. They were the ones who knew what did and did not sell in their shops. They were the ones cutting my checks and encouraging me to keep up the good work, because my success meant success for them. And since I lack the sales gene, I was spared the tragedy of selling directly to picky customers. The trained salespeople at the shops themselves did a much better job of selling my jewelry than I did. I was also discerning (or lucky) enough to consign my items at stores with fair practices. The percentage of the sale I received was no less half and this kept both the sellers and myself invested in the quality and eventual sale of my jewelry.

In contrast to this happy experience, I once tried selling on eBay, hopeful that the children of my creativity would call out to some searching individual on the web. What I got instead was a complicated listing process, fees that piled up and no bids on my one piece that was lost among thousands of other earrings, bracelets and necklaces. Being a problem-solving type of person, I researched what kinds of jewelry were eliciting bids. What I found was perhaps not completely surprising, neither was it encouraging. Sellers who were selling large numbers of their own handmade pieces were ones who clearly had excellent photographs, lots of extra features on their postings, a well-established name based on their extremely unique designs and loads of listings. I had no resources to purchase or take excellent photographs, to purchase extra features on my listings, to post multiple items nor did I have an established reputation to guarantee bidders would seek me out specifically. So my listing was lost in the sea of jewelry listings on eBay and I was out a couple of bucks.

Readers may be thinking to themselves, why didn't she just suck it up and pay the extra money to post multiple premium listings? I think that this alone wouldn't have done it because I would still be missing one important aspect of successful eBay selling - reputation. And one of the best ways to build that up is, yep, you guessed it, selling at small local businesses. An established relationship with a shop-owner guarantees an established base of their dedicated customers. These are the customers that small businesses rely on for survival and an important tool in getting the word out about any product. Once that base is secured, a business can begin to grow and expand into other realms, such as the internet. That is why I believe that consignment is an important first step in selling anything you can't be guaranteed will sell on eBay. It is also an important part of business networking and securing a place to sell again and again.

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