Consignment Tips for Your Jewelry Business
I’m always amazed at the advice and opinions posed on jewelry sites and chat boards relating to consignment. It’s usually a mixed bag of…
A) In my 35 years of designing and manufacturing jewelry, I’ve never had one bad experience with consignment.
B) My jewelry is so good, I only wholesale.
C) Contract? I’ve always relied on a handshake.
D) I just use the consignment agreement the store provides.
Artist A – You are either bucking the trend or have very few high quality consignment accounts. Good for you!
Artist B – Time for a reality check. If you are really serious about expanding your business, you have to leverage by using a combination of wholesale and consignment. Unless you’re a well known branded name like David Yurman or John Hardy, what savvy business owner is going to bet on an unknown artist, especially in an economic downturn? Maybe you’re an eccentric or “purist” and don’t view your craft as a business. You don’t have to be afraid of consignment if you do your homework upfront and cover yourself.
Artist C – Are you running a business or a charity? Keep operating on good faith, and you will soon be out of business. Unfortunately, trust no longer works on a handshake.
Artist D – The artist should always provide the contract, not the store. More on this in a minute.
What would happen if the owner (in this case a sole-proprietor) of one of your best consignment accounts suddenly died? I’ll tell you. It happened to me, and if I hadn’t taken the proper steps upfront, the estate executors would have either sold my $15K of consignment jewelry (which I still had title to) or be wearing it to this day! Without a consignment contract, my chances of filing a legally enforceable claim with the probate court requesting the return of my jewelry would have been slim. If you have ever experienced probate, it’s up to creditors to make a claim, usually within 90 days of opening . After 90 days, you lose.
Fortunately, I was alerted to the gallery closing early on in the process, since I lived only 2 miles away from the gallery and would frequently drive past it running errands. If the gallery had been across country, I probably would have found out too late to make a claim, and would be out $15K. The attorney representing the estate said I was the only claimant to have a properly documented consignment agreement along with an inventory list (luckily I even took pictures of every item), making the return of my jewelry as smooth as possible. The store record keeping was a complete mess. Even though the owner did have staff, they had no clue as to what was bought wholesale or on consignment. Outstanding invoices were in excess of $150K, creditors all over the world, and heirs totally clueless as what to do. I still had to wait 10 months from the close of the gallery to the end of probate. And by the way, the gallery owner operated on a handshake.
The same situation occurs in a bankruptcy, or samples you leave with a sales rep. The best protection is always provide the store/gallery with your consignment agreement ( or in the case with a rep, your independent contractor agreement), since you are assuming all the financial risk and stand to lose everything. Sure, the gallery is betting that your jewelry will sell. What’s the worst case scenario for the gallery? Your jewelry doesn’t sell and they’ve wasted shelf space. If the gallery goes out of business for whatever reason, without an agreement, you’re left holding the bag .
Also, file a UCC1 form with the state in which the store/gallery/rep/corporation/owner resides. Filing fee is nominal, usually $25 and is really your only protection (other than a solid consignment or independent contractor agreement). A Financing Statement (Form UCC1) is filed to perfect a security interest in named collateral and establishes priority in case of debtor default or bankruptcy. For more about UCC1 for California, visit http://www.sos.ca.gov/business/ucc/ra_9_ucc-1page.htm
Google the term UCC1 and the State for additional information (other than California).
For a solid consignment or independent contractor agreement, always consult a legal professional. Make sure that your contract, in addition to a typical consignment agreement http://www.ganoksin.com/borisat/nenam/consignment-agree.htm, has the following:
• Inventory listing of all consigned items
• Copyright clause stating that no works may be reproduced by the gallery/rep
• Choice of Law
• Attorney’s Fees Provision
• UCC1 filing clause
Tips for Choosing Consignors:
A) Ask the gallery to provide evidence of insurance (you would be surprised how many boutiques and galleries aren’t covered for theft). If they aren’t covered, you are totally at risk in the event of one (artists/manufacturers have been forced into bankruptcy due to uninsured thefts). Most basic jewelers block insurance policies start at $300 a month if you self-insure. Jeweler’s Mutual is the industry leader. If you can’t afford this, and the store isn’t insured, either choose not to do business with them or understand this is an exposed risk. If you choose to do business with an uninsured store, put them high on your radar screen and follow-up monthly to make sure things are running smoothly. Pull the account if payments start slipping. Only place no more than you can stand to lose.
B) Make sure you put a clause in your Consignment Contract stating that a UCC1 might be filed against them. If the store objects, it’s a sign of potential trouble. I would walk!
C) Set a criteria for years in business. I generally only deal with stores with a track record of at least 5 years or more in business. If they’ve survived this long, they must be doing something right.
D) Get a list of artist references and make sure you contact at least three or more before starting a relationship. Ask about payment regularity and any experienced problems.
E) Review the gallery’s return policy and payment terms. Good consignment stores will have less than a 10 day return policy and pay within 30 days. Understand the cash cycle. Personally, I wouldn’t get involved in any arrangement over 45 day cash cycle. I’ve seen (believe it or not) more than 60 days to pay.
F) Make a deal! Offer them a 90 day buy-back guarantee, or a 50/50 split where the gallery buys outright half of the placed inventory, the rest on memo. For the 90 day buy-back, they pay all upfront and you stand ready to buy-back after 90 days any unsold merchandise with a 1-to-1 or 1-to-2 re-purchase.
In all the above cases, hopefully you can learn from my experience and find some takeaways. Knowing how to approach consignment wisely can leverage your jewelry business, build brand awareness, and increase your profits.
10 Great Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Jewelry Website
Getting superior qualified traffic to your website should be your primary goal for any online jewelry designer. With high-quality targeted traffic, you can practically grow your online jewelry business 24/7. You can analyze and track click-through rates to better your conversions, offer surveys to discover customer trends, and gauge the potential of launching new lines, ….just to name a few. A steady flow of traffic helps you build your lists and solidify your relationships with customers over time.
Of course you can generate a ton of free traffic if you have done SEO properly, but it’s unwise to rely solely on the search engines for your traffic, or from any one source, for that matter.
By strategically planning your traffic generation campaign, you will be making a well-rounded game plan to continuously drive traffic to your jewelry site. This long term strategy mainly involves one basic concept - the use of unique content - that pleases both your visitors and the search engines. How does content actually attract website traffic?
1. Writing Keyword-rich Articles
Assuming you know how to investigate the most important keywords related to your jewelry business, you can build a story specific to these keywords into the context of an article or post for your site or blog. The key is to write unique content frequently. The more, the merrier. This is especially important for jewelry designers. We tend to focus only on product descriptions within our shopping carts, and not on writing full length feature stories. Most of our sites consist of a few pages (Home, About, Press, Contact) that eventually loose page rank due to their static nature. Websites with pages of real fresh changing content will become a feeding frenzy for the search engines and grow your site’s strength over time.
2. Free reports
Offering free reports are a great way to attract subscribers to your newsletter. With this strategy, it is best to build viral reports. These reports can also be given away by other visitors on related jewelry, fashion, or social booking marking websites, with a link to your website inside the article, ebook, or post. You provide them something to give to their customers for free and you get the traffic that is sure to follow. You could offer reports on diamond buying tips, jewelry care tips, the power of gemstones, how to accessorize, industry trends, etc.
3. Start a Newsletter
Did you know that it takes on average between 8 – 10 points of contact before a lead converts into a customer? That number is even higher as price increases. This is why it is imperative that every jewelry website have a newsletter. If you start a newsletter, be consistent. Send it out monthly or bi-monthly. Sending out quarterly is too out of sight…out of mind. The goal here is to establish and maintain a relationship with your prospect in order to build trust. To have a newsletter, you’ve got to have content. Start putting some ideas together and write those newsletters. Use what you’ve garnered from your surveys, or focus on upcoming jewelry or industry trends, then wait for the follow up of traffic as they open their email and come back to your website. If you don’t like to write, or don’t have the time, hire a professional. Elance.com is a great place to start.
4. Link Pages
I’m sure you have seen link pages with the regular bland list of ‘link partners’? Be creative and use your links to gain additional standing and provide extra content. You can build a separate page for each of your link categories and write roughly 150-300 words of copy on that subject. You can the offer your suggested link resources underneath your copy and make yourself a source for information rather than just your typical laundry list of boring links.
5. Forums
There are a ton of jewelry forums on the net. Search for forums that discuss something related to your area of specialization. Ganoksin.com is one of the most established and respected forums in the jewelry industry. In most cases you can either post a link to your website in your signature or share information that arouses questions concerning your site from other posters. Some forums permit you to post your articles.
6. Press release.
Press releases should be an integral component of your marketing strategy. Writing press releases to announce new designs, results of a poll, or pertinent news and upcoming events, can get you free advertising in the media and a potential flood of inbound links to your site.
7. Submit Your Articles to Relevant Websites
Another beneficial use for your articles is to offer them directly to similar or complimentary product sites you would like to share an audience with. This is a great way to gain credibility for your topic or niche, and will also provide useful inbound hyperlinks all over the Net.
8. Affiliate Programs
Help your affiliates steer traffic to your site by giving great copy, product images, or reports to post on their sites or in their newsletters. Your affiliates are also in need of content to provide their customers and if you’re providing that content for free they will have more success in sending their subscribers or visitors in your direction.
9. Article Announcement Lists
Article announcement lists are very similar to article directories. Your article will be placed before an audience of webmasters and publishers who may choose to use your article on their site or in their newsletter. A good place to start is YahooGroups.
10. Blogs
I saved the best for last… If you don’t have a blog, start one today! This is a must for any online jewelry business. Writing a blog that is pertinent to your jewelry business will permit you to attract an audience that may not respond to a typical website. Providing content and news concerning your topic with hyperlinks to your various articles or sales pages is an indirect way to send traffic to your site. Your content can be just as valuable to other bloggers who may have a tough time finding content to share with their readers. Allow others to syndicate your contents through RSS feeds, with a back-link to your site.
Remember, the way to the top of the search engines and getting loads of traffic from “natural” search for you jewelry business, is to populate the web with lots of fresh unique content that your readers and search engines love to read.
SEO for Your Jewelry Business: How to Rank High on the Search Engines
If you thought that keyword density is all it takes to see your jewelry website zoom up to the top of search engine rankings, you’ve definitely underestimated the intelligence of search engine spiders and your customers. Keyword density helps, yes, but only if it’s used appropriately. Littering your jewelry site with pertinent keywords without consideration for relevance and grammar will only serve to alienate your readers in the long run, rather than further engaging their interest.
For genuinely helpful SEO techniques that will make both search engine spiders and readers see the value of your jewelry site, here’s what you should do:
FLASH CAN HELP AND HURT AT THE SAME TIME
As jewelry designers, by nature, we live in a very visual world. Many of us have Flash animation sites. Although they’re cool and attention- getting, if your Flash takes more than 5 seconds to load, chances are you can kiss that potential customer goodbye…forever. These days, even with hi-speed cable and DSL, no one has the patience to wait for 30 seconds for your site to load.
Secondly, search engine spiders only read a limited number of languages and Flash, unfortunately, is not one of them. If your goal is to increase website traffic, you are severely limiting the potential of “natural” search engine traffic by having a site developed entirely in Flash.
Thirdly, skip the music, or at least have a start delay so that shoppers can opt out. It takes long to load and most people find it irritating. Numerous surveys have shown that a majority of corporate America shops online at work or late at night when the kids are asleep. Wouldn’t you find it downright embarrassing (especially if you work in cube land) or annoying to all of a sudden have music blaring at you that you didn’t ask for in the first place? Don’t deliver something your visitors aren’t anticipating, or you will certainly drive up your abandon rates.
Truth be told, as long as your jewelry website displays consistently interesting and valuable content, you need not concern yourself with actively promoting your website. Your readers will find a way to your site and choose either to bookmark you, subscribe to your RSS feed, or to check back on their own accord.
This is why it’s important that you exercise care when creating keyword-focused content. You must ensure that all keywords are used appropriately and grammatically correct. Your choice of keywords must not cause the copy to sound false or nonsensical.
CREATE LINKS TO DIFFERENT PARTS OF YOUR WEBSITE
Everyone, with even the slightest amount of knowledge of SEO, is aware that having other websites link back to your page will increase your search engine rankings. That, however, is not enough to make your website zoom to the top 10 results. If you wish to have the best search engine rankings for your website, you need to convince your readers and the unfailingly curious search engine spiders that your website is worth reading from start to finish.
In other words, don’t just focus on providing links to your homepage. Create links to other internal pages of your website as well. If you have a great article stored on your website, create a link for it and allow the appropriate sites to display the article on their pages as well just as long they provide a link back to you.
THE IMPORTANCE OF AFFILIATE MANAGEMENT
A great relationship is where both people give and take. This should apply to you and your affiliates as well. If your affiliate was kind enough to host a link back to your jewelry site, make sure that you do the same for them as well. Besides exchanging links, there are other things that you can also trade to help increase each other site’s search engine rankings. You can also trade articles or encourage one’s members to visit the other site as well.
MAKE APPROPRIATE USE OF THE BOLD TAG
When you use a term of endearment for one and only one person alone, it’s an indication that the other person holds a special place in your life. In the same way, using bold tags (h1, h2, h3…etc.) emphasize certain terms and make it known to readers that these terms must be given special notice.
More importantly, the use of bold tags also makes search engine spiders aware that these terms are of significance to your website. Be careful, however, when using bold tags. Don’t use them frequently as this will make the terms lose importance and could alert the search engine spiders to keyword stuffing and get your site sandboxed.
YOUR SITE’S LAYOUT MUST BE SEO-FRIENDLY
Don’t just focus on keyword optimization when working to make your website as SEO-friendly as possible. You need to give equal importance to the site layout. If the links are difficult to locate, this could easily turn off readers and make them abandon your site altogether. Certain combinations of colors and images may also make the website content difficult to read. Just remember that when designing a website, it must be attractive and user-friendly at the same time.
In the end, search engine optimization is actually just a technique based on plain old common sense. All you need to remember is that you’re there to please the readers; when you please them, you please search engine spiders as well.
Why Start a Blog About My Handcrafted Jewelry Business?
There is only a single response to this, and it’s for the reason that blogging for your handcrafted jewelry business is mainly easier and more robust in benefits versus other forms of internet promotion.
Why blogging is easier than other forms of internet promotion for your handcrafted jewelry business.
Simple to Design
Contrary to websites, whereonly a few but hardly ever all of its pages comprise of static design, blogs continually have one overall design for all its pages. You can also opt to to design in CSS or HTML, whichever is more acceptable to you, but if you don’t know any programming language, you could always opt to any of the pre-manufactured template designs obtainable through the blog service provider.
Uncomplicated to update or reorganize
Nothing like websites, which you basically have to update or reorganize through manual means, blogs can be simply updated or modified by clicking on the edit button for the particular post you desire to alter. After keying in or removing the appropriate data, you’ll only have to click the update or save button and that is it! Everything’s back to normal and flow of traffic can continue once more.
Easy to Classify
Unlike websites, which typically requires you to categorize pages or data one by one, blogs typically allow you easy control over categories and themes. With just a single click, you can repeatedly relocate groups of posts from one category to another. You can also give a name and description for each category.
The advantages of using blogs versus other forms of internet promotion for your handcrafted jewelry business.
SEO-Friendly URLs
Unlike websites and various types of promotion, blog service providers frequently give blog owners simple and SEO friendly options for selecting and creating their blog URLs. Accordingly, blogs have a enhanced chance of rising high in search engine rankings even if they cannot be labeled as websites per se.
Internal Linking
Blog owners can also make use of deep linking strategies through their posts. By utilizing trackbacks and additional types of links, bloggers can routinely give their entries assorted links. Thus, search engine bots will commonly have a more positive attitude toward these blogs and therefore giving them superior rankings. To take full advantage of this advantage, always take note of the correlated blog entries so you can link them together. Consider separating your entries into segments or posting follow-up entries. Use blog post titles that easily demonstrates to readers whether posts are associated to other posts such as Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.
Connecting to Your Readers through RSS
Blog owners also have an easier option of relating and updating their readers merely by RSS. If readers like what they’re seeing and reading, all they have to do is utilize the RSS link provided in the blog and they can repeatedly get alerts, updates, and news in their email inbox.
Points for Diligence
Unlike other types of Internet promotion, writing often isn’t rewarded but in fact penalized because readers consider email campaigns and keyword stuffed web pages infuriating, while search engine spiders view them with doubt. It is absolutely a different world when it comes to blogging. Every time a blog owner posts original content, this is equal to one brownie point for your blog in the eyes of search engine spiders. The more you write the greater chances for your blog to gain in terms of search engine rankings. More notably, posting is free so you can update as often as you want daily.
Better Interaction
You can also communicate more and better with clients and readers by blogging. Most importantly, the blogging community is far more lively than people who frequent forums or subscribe to email alerts. Bloggers love to write and are therefore more inclined to comment on whatever post you have. Each comment, by the way, is also viewed as a brownie point in your favor.
If the above reasons and benefits have convinced you to make a blog for your handcrafted jewelry business, here are some tips you should consider:
Select your title sensibly, whether it’s for your blog itself or for any of your entries. Titles are one of the most strategic things in the eyes of search engine spiders.
Be brief. Bloggers are rarely in favor of tediously long posts. They want succinctness not detail.
Increase Your Jewelry Business Exponentially by Blogging
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How a Jewelry Business Can Benefit from Internet Marketing
As an online jewelry retailer or store owner, do any of these questions keep you up at night…
- Why is my competition ranking higher in Google organic searches?
- Why can’t I get converting traffic?
- Should I be concerned with Web 2.0 and Social Bookmarking?
- What is an autoresponder?
- Should I bother with offline advertising?
- How do I build an affiliate empire?
- Is Email marketing worth my time?
- Why do I have such low conversion rates?
- Does Adwords really work?
- Should I hire an SEO expert to increase my web traffic, or can I do it myself?
…and the list goes on.
They sure kept me up at night… and I’m going to share with you my personal experiences on how I have taken multiple jewelry sites to the next level – from a hobby I started out of my home, to well oiled internet money making machines that run 24/7 on auto-pilot.
After leaving a very lucrative career in financial and technology management in 2003 to pursue my dreams of crafting my own designer jewelry, I had to continually learn about internet marketing in order to stay steps ahead of my competition and grow my business. When I started my designer jewelry business 5 years ago, I would have loved it if I could have found honest answers about the potential of marketing handcrafted jewelry on the internet. I can’t tell you the countless hours and thousands of dollars I have spent on numerous software applications, seminars, and ebooks trying to discover the right mix to expand my business.
And let’s face it, in the jewelry biz , it’s all about design and uniqueness…so even though I’m happy to share my experiences with you, and save you the time and effort so you can get back to designing and marketing your jewelry, I feel threatened in no way by the increased competition.
So, why should I listen to what you have to say? What’s in it for me?
I will show you….
- SEO strategies that have placed my sites in the top ten organic search results for over 20+ keyword phrases related to my niche.
- Techniques on how you can increase your site traffic. One of my sites gets over 10,000 unique visitors a month that stay more than 3 minutes (the norm is less than a minute).
- How to build effective Double Opt-in lists that have grown my email marketing by 326%.
- How to develop an effective autoresponder strategy that converts at 4.35% (average is less than 1%).
- Adwords strategies that convert at 3.15%.
- And how I built an affiliate empire that generates 15% of my gross sales.
So stay tuned for some great information on internet marketing that will take your jewelry business to the next level.
Sincerely,
John S. Brana
